Tag Archives: inspection

NYC’s Birdbath Bakery closed for filth and inadequate refrigeration on rickshaws

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Who would name a food place the Birdbath Bakery?

Birds are factories for salmonella and campylobacter and I wouldn’t want them bathing around food.

If the goal is to be New York City’s most sustainable bakery, then why not. But sustainable is not the same as sanitary.

Grub Street New York reports inspection results indicate the bake shop couldn’t present a Food Protection Certificate, there was evidence of mice, and food-contact surfaces weren’t properly sanitized.

But an employee tells us that the main reason for the closure was that Birdbath had started transporting savory items (salads, pizzas, sandwiches) by rickshaw from City Bakery and didn’t have adequate refrigerators for keeping them at the Department’s required temperature of 41 degrees or below.
 

Rodents, roaches and rubbish in Sydney restaurants

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Rodent droppings, cockroaches and a build-up of rubbish has led four central Sydney (that’s in Australia) restaurants to be prosecuted, fined, and named and shamed on a government register designed to prompt businesses to clean up their act.

The New South Wales Food Authority publishes lists of food outlets that have breached or are alleged to have breached state food safety laws.

NSW Primary Industries Minister Steve Whan said in a statement some of the offences included "unpalatable acts" such as food, waste and grease build-up, and the failure to eradicate and prevent pests.

In some cases, live cockroaches, rodent droppings, smears and hairs were observed throughout the premises.
 

Dirty dining Vegas style: Souper Salad

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This is the way to handle a bad restaurant inspection, especially with the television cameras rolling: take responsibility, fix things, and no whining.

KTNV reports the Souper Salad was issued with 29 demerits by the Southern Nevada Health District, primarily related to a salad bar that wasn’t keeping foods at the proper temperature.

When Contact 13 stopped at the restaurant, Souper Salad was right in the middle of a re-inspection. The manager, Jeff Brooks, took time to explain to us his concerns about the restaurant’s C grade. "It was definitely a concern and that’s why we took care of the steps as needed."

He says he had all the food at the salad bar thrown out, and that the salad bar was adjusted to the appropriate temperature. And in the end, Brooks says he stands by the quality of his restaurant. "Unfortunately sometimes these things happen. I do care about the type of food, the temperatures of the foods I feed to the public. I’m not one of these managers that doesn’t care about it."

We spoke with the Health District, which confirms, the restaurant was re-inspected. Souper Salad made the necessary changes to go from 29 demerits down to only 4, enough for an A grade. Looking into their history, this was actually their first C grade in 3 years.
 

UK cafe owner fined for food safety offence

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The owner of the Rock and Rolls Cafe, Chapel St Leonards, U.K., was fined £2,000 and ordered to pay costs of £400 after his cafe failed a food hygiene inspection in August 2009.

Breaches of food safety offences included failing to control flies and keep work surfaces clean.

In a refreshing restatement of why inspections take place, Coun Sandra Harrison, portfolio holder for health at East Lindsey District Council, said,

"It is important that food business owners remember that their reputation is on the line and they could receive a hefty fine if they are found to be breaching food safety standards. In this case we have seen significant improvements but these types of incidents should never occur. When we do detect food safety issues we will always take action because it is putting the health of our community at risk."
 

Ringo says, yum yum hospital food; hospital kitchen inspections in Philadelphia region yield range of results

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Don Sapatkin of the Philadelphia Inquirer has been writing for at least a year about deficiencies in the antiquated Philly system and that even with improvements in inspections, most food establishments don’t publicize even their most positive inspection reports, and no government in the Philadelphia region requires that they be tacked up for easy viewing like a menu.

Last week, Sapatkin turned his investigative focus to Philadelphia’s hospital kitchens, and found they were far more likely than food establishments as a whole to be out of compliance with food-safety regulations, averaging six violations apiece in their most recent quarterly inspections by the city health department.

The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, routinely named among the nation’s best medical centers, was cited 14 times. The largely organic kitchen at Cancer Treatment Centers of America’s Eastern Regional Medical Center in the Northeast had eight violations.

And in New Jersey, Virtua Memorial Hospital in Mount Holly was rated "conditional satisfactory" after inspections in November and last month found several violations.

"Many live German cockroaches observed on or at base of wall in dish-washing room, dead roaches observed under shelving in paper storage, next to ice machine, and behind refrigerator in vegetable prep area," a Burlington County health department inspector wrote June 28.

All three hospitals said the violations had been quickly corrected.

Food generally isn’t considered when patients choose a hospital. Yet a review of inspection reports from around the region found scores of violations, as well as wide variations in what was cited from county to county. Some evidence suggests that the scrutiny is more rigorous in the city.

Inspections are a far-from-perfect measure of risk: Inspectors found nothing amiss before or after an outbreak sickened 54 people and killed three patients at a Louisiana state hospital in May. And experts say most hospital kitchens go overboard with food safety, cooking so thoroughly to kill microbes that flavors may be lost.

Sheri Morris, food program manager at the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, which regulates restaurants and stores but not hospitals, said,

"Anybody who has a compromised immune system is going to be more susceptible to food-borne illness. And hospitals are full of people with compromised immune systems.”

Since inspections are a snapshot of a constantly changing kitchen, they have limited ability to predict either safety or danger. "Just because you went in there and the place had no violations doesn’t mean that 15 minutes later the place didn’t go to pot," said Dennis J. Bauer, food-safety coordinator for the Bucks County Health Department.

Lack of food safety costly for diners, eateries; Alabama training center tries to fix errors

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Here’s a common scene from many of the mom and pop restaurants I’ve visited: a towel used to sop up juice from raw hamburger meat also is used to wipe down counters.

Phyllis Fenn, a standardization officer with the Alabama Department of Public Health’s bureau of environmental services, has seen the same thing – too often.

The Montgomery Advertiser reports today the Food Safety Training Center on Atlanta Highway is an attempt both to help restaurant owners avoid bad inspections and to protect their customers’ health.

When Alabama adopted the 2005 Food Code, one provision was that at least one person in restaurants where raw foods are handled, including fast-food eateries and sushi bars, would become food safety certified. When the state adopted the code, it opted to go with a lead-in time — Jan. 1 of this year.

The classes can help restaurants improve their health department inspection scores, which is exactly what they are designed to do, Fenn said.

She said the certification class helps restaurants reduce food-related illnesses as well as teaching them about the proper temperatures to cook and hold food (the temperature of food that sits out at a buffet) and proper hygiene.
 

Avoiding ‘C’ food in New York City

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According to the New York Post, some of the city’s best-known eateries are lucky the Health Department is starting to hand out letter grades next week — instead of last month — because thousands would have ended up with a bottom-rung "C" plastered in their front windows.

Officials estimate that about 6,000 of the city’s 24,000 eateries had enough violation points in June to have earned the lowest mark on a three-letter rating scale devised by the city.

The "C" restaurants would have ranged from the Lion, a sizzling new spot in Greenwich Village, to the venerable Gallagher’s steakhouse in Midtown, to the century-old Katz’s deli emporium on the Lower East Side.

Even Radio City Music Hall’s snack bar made the "C" list.

The Health Department plans to award "A" grades to restaurants that accumulate no more than 13 violation points; "B" to those with 14 to 27 points; and "C" for 28 or more points.

Restaurant owners and managers contacted by The Post who would have faced a "C" last month were surprisingly supportive of the grading system.

"It’s for the sake of public health — I’m perfectly OK with that," said Jake Dell, son of the owner of Katz’s deli, which accumulated 47 points on its record for such infractions as evidence of roaches and mice, as well as bad plumbing.

Like every restaurateur contacted, he said the conditions cited by inspectors have since been corrected. A reinspection July 6 brought Katz’s score down to 23 — in the "B" range.

Hundreds of Texas food makers unlicensed, avoided inspections

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Hundreds of businesses across Texas have been manufacturing and selling food without a state license and, in some cases, have escaped health inspections intended to ensure the safety of those products.

The Dallas Morning News reports this morning the businesses were flushed out in a statewide crackdown on unlicensed food manufacturers, begun last year by the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the health department, said,

"Many of the companies we have discovered are small operations that were simply unaware they needed a state license. For the most part, they have been more than willing to get into compliance with us. … Some of them did have safety issues. Most were corrected on the spot or we’re working with them to get them into compliance."

The state has identified 355 companies that appear to be producing and selling a wide variety of eatable products – from barbecue sauce in Fort Worth to pepper jelly in Dallas to ice cream in Houston – all without obtaining a manufacturing license from the state.

The state went searching for unlicensed food manufacturers in the embarrassing aftermath of last year’s discovery of an unlicensed peanut-processing plant in West Texas.

The Plainview plant, owned by a subsidiary of Peanut Corporation of America, had operated for four years without any state-required safety inspections.

None of these new cases investigated so far rise to the level of the peanut plant, which closed in February 2009 after salmonella was detected in the plant. A subsequent state inspection found rodent parts and feathers in a crawl space above the peanut production line.
 

Nikki Marcotte: Manhattan (Kansas) Burger Shack hit with 5 critical violations

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A local food establishment has been cited for 5 critical health code violations here in Manhattan.

Big D’s Burger Shack on Tuttle Creek Blvd. was cited by the Kansas Department of Agriculture’s Division of Food Safety and Lodging during a routine inspection for violations such as failing to wash hands when handling food, mishandling food items, and failing to mark expiration dates on open packages of hot dogs. No follow up inspection is expected, as most of the violations were handled on-site.

To see the report, go to: http://www.ksda.gov/winwam/index.php?id=108585FR&p=&n=big%20d%27s%20burger%20shack&t=0&c=manhattan&co=RILEY&i1=&i2=
 

UK Food Standards Agency to be abolished by health secretary; was it due to ‘piping hot’ cooking advice?

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On March 20, 1996, British Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell rose in the House to inform colleagues that scientists had discovered a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in 10 victims, and that they could not rule out a link with consumption of beef from cattle with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease.

Overnight, the British beef market collapsed and politicians quickly learned how to enunciate bovine spongiform encephalopathy and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Within days, the European Union banned exports of British beef; consumption of beef fell throughout Europe; and the tell-tale triumvirate of uncertain science, risk and politics was played out—and continues—in media headlines. Beef consumption across the European Union (EU) dropped 11 per cent in 1996, and the BSE crisis cost the EU US$2.8 billion in subsidies alone to the beef industry in the first year.

Yet the March 20, 1996 announcement, rather than the beginning of the on-going BSE crisis, as it is now commonly called, was instead the culmination of 10 years of bureaucratic mismanagement, political bravado, and a gross underestimation of the public’s capacity to deal with risk.

In response to BSE and several other food poisoning outbreaks, the Food Standards Agency was created in 2000. I may have some of the details wrong because I’m going for speed at the moment and relying on wiki, but one of the key philosophical underpinnings of the new agency was that farming, food processing and food safety maybe shouldn’t be concentrated in one department. You hear the same thing when Washington-types talk about the need for a single food safety agency.

The Guardian reports tonight U.K. health secretary, Andrew Lansley, is to announce the abolition of the Food Standards Agency – which has fought a running battle with industry over the introduction of color-coded "traffic light" warnings for groceries, TV dinners and snacks – sparking accusations the minister has "caved in to big business."

As part of sweeping changes Lansley will reassign the FSA’s regulatory aspects – including safety and hygiene in the food chain – to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Meanwhile, its responsibilities for nutrition and diet advice and its public health remit will be incorporated into the Department of Health.

There’s lots of allegations about industry-pressure, and food dyes, and obesity and genetically-engineered foods, but not too much about food safety, except for a spokesman for cereal manufacturer Kellogg’s, who said,

"The FSA has done a very good job in terms of food safety and science but there was a feeling that perhaps its role was becoming far too broad.”

Whoa there. Dr Judith Hilton, Head of Microbiological Safety at the FSA, said in July 2007,

‘”The current UK advice that burgers should be cooked at 70°C for 2 minutes or equivalent is upheld by this ACMSF report. Advice to consumers remains the same – to follow manufacturers’ instructions and make sure that burgers are piping hot throughout, cooked until the juices run clear and there’s no pink meat inside.”

And I’ve made fun of the advice, because clear juices and meat color are lousy indicators of microbiological safety.

The move will lead to lots of proclamations about all things trendy for foodies, but won’t do much for food safety.