Posted on 06/23/2018 8:10:21 AM PDT by texas booster
On Aug. 18, 2016, the Lakewood location of Mi Cocina, a popular upscale Tex-Mex chain, faced one particularly unhappy visitor: a Dallas health inspector.
The food safety report filed that day graded Mi Cocina at 60 points out of 100. The details werent pretty. Flies in the kitchen. No hot water for washing dishes. Cooked chicken sitting out at room temperature.
In summary, the report concluded, Mi Cocina fails to meet City of Dallas Food Protection and Education sanitation standards. 10 day follow-up inspection required.
That follow-up inspection never took place. Mi Cocinas next health inspection came 221 days later, on March 27, 2017. The restaurant passed.
...
Dallas recently launched an open data website that, for the first time, allows visitors to read each kitchens violations without filing public records requests. But the raw data is intimidating to new users, and it lacks an easy-to-read hub listing restaurants that are failing. So a private citizen rose to the challenge.
On a page called Dallas Health Inspection Horrors, David Lawhon maintains a table of restaurants with low scores, noting repeat offenders and marking the worst facilities with vomit and poo emojis. Lawhon is not a sanitation worker and never has been.
His project began more than a decade ago, after a series of regrettable restaurant meals and a case of food poisoning. At the time, the online Dallas inspection scores were written out in a simple list.
The information needed to be integrated, to be presented in a more engaging and accessible way, and to answer the simpler question, What businesses should I be concerned about? rather than, What is the score for every restaurant in the city? Lawhon says.
...
But Lawhons work is constrained by one big problem: The citys data isnt just badly presented. Its wrong.
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasobserver.com ...
I am always amazed at liberals crying for more government (except for border security), when government at any level is at best merely satisfactory and often incompetent.
This is an even-handed look at one big city and how it can't even get basic citizens' food safety correct.
But the city supervisors get an "A" in excuses and deflections.
If it is this bad in Dallas, what are other cities like across the US?
What about in other countries?
Payoffs taking place.
Ate in Dallas three times this week on a business trip. Two places were big chains and the sanitation was sketchy at best. I stuck to well cooked items. No salads or cold chicken. If the front door is grimy, the restrooms are not clean the kitchen is worse -guaranteed.
It's been a time honored tradition since the city of Ur, and human nature hasn't changed at all.
I used to see it on the East Coast when a true dump would have a high score posted on the window. Not a “hole in the wall” but a true dump.
I guess Benjamin is still the language of city inspectors everywhere.
How many people got sick eating at La Cocina? If none, then I’d say all this “inspection” nonsense was nothing more than bureaucratic restraint of trade.
There is a Mi Cocina here in Tulsa. Excellent place. Last time there we had the brisket quesadillas and fish tacos. Yummy. Very clean. Great staff.
City of Denton hired an assistant Dallas city manager as the city manager. Under his management and city council guidelines, city had, when I moved a few years ago, about a dozen Code Enforcement officers and 2 Health inspectors. Reasoning was that the city made more money off code enforcement than restaurant inspections.
The chances of Lady D-21 getting to go out for a meal this weekend keeps dropping.
More soldiers were killed in wars from disease than bullets, which is why these disciplines existed.
People here asked a few days ago why when I posted about a Whataburger burger flipper put his spatula down the backside of his pants to scratch wasn't reported. Well, there it is. Any restaurant outside a big city doesn't have to worry about being inspected or shut down.
There was one café out here in podunkville that had a backed up septic (stinky feces everywhere) so the restrooms were locked for over a year. Food was stored, in hot Texas, on a dirt floor out back in a screened in area. It only closed down when the owner skipped town.
Read on FR yesterday of the increase in HepA.
I got food poisoning a couple months ago. Lasted about a week and a half. Sicker than a dog and thought I was going to die for a couple of days. Read on FR that over 100 got food poisoning from a restaurant catered event in the same city I’d visited and had eaten out in. It was a different restaurant but was coincidental.
This is why I don’t like eating out and rarely do so. I’d much rather cook at home and know what germs are in my food and where they came from. That’s also why I wash my hands when coming in from grocery shopping and wash them again after putting away the food.
Watch tv cooking shows and notice they don’t usually have sinks for the chefs to wash their hands after handling raw meat. Ick.
Sorry but these are pretty serious code violations. While only a snapshot in time, if kitchen staff doesn't know how to maintain cooked food before serving, and if the kitchen manager doesn't even boil water for hand washing dishes; all are signs of very poor training and enforcement by the restaurant management.
These are really bad sanitation practices. People can and will get very sick from kitchens as poorly managed as this. Overall I really like Mi Cocina but their sanitation practices point to poor hiring practices.
If a full serve, expensive restaurant can't be bothered to understand sanitation then they should be shut down.
I needed a health card when I worked in a restaurant, which is an admittedly weak form of inspection. But TB and Hep A B C can kill.
AFAIK all health cards were dropped once AIDS carriers became a protected class.
I’ve witnessed, more than once, a café owner’s kid having it’s diaper changed on the kitchen counter or tables and the surface never being wiped down much less sterilized. No, never ate there. That place, in another podunville small town, was open for decades and never saw an inspector.
The spatula scraper should be more upset when his mom asks him how he got grease inside his shorts ...
Here, outside of Austin, I haven’t heard of anyone needing a health card. Food workers come and go like a revolving door.
But isn’t this really what we’ve come to expect from government at all levels? Government agencies virtually all exist for the sole benefit of the government workers. They are simply government “jobs programs” with some “public benefit or control” as their pretext.
As we've seen here, the watchdogs don't really do their jobs, or at least do them inconsistently. Yet no adverse effects materialize. So how useful are the watchdogs in the first place, aside from making people believe they're safer? (And stealing taxpayer money, bribes, and power).
Calling Gordon Ramsay
Please pick up the white telephone.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.