Most Australian restaurants serve 'crap:' critic
Matthew Evans is a food critic for The Sydney Morning Herald.
In September 2003, the paper published a review by Evans of the now defunct restaurant Coco Roco at Sydney's King Street Wharf, in which Evans said the dishes were "unpalatable" and that the restaurant's overall value was "a shocker," scoring it 9/20 - in the "stay home" category.
The restaurant went under in March 2004, and is suing both the paper and Evans for defamation and damages.
Under cross-examination, Evans, a former chef, said while he believed a bad review could have some impact on a restaurant, it was not enough to cause its demise, and was asked if he still held the opinion he wrote in his 2007 book which said "most restaurants in this country still serve crap food."
Evans stood by that opinion, adding that he was "not too happy" with most food he was served in restaurants.
Me neither. I had an artsy friend do this recreation of a New Yorker cartoon some 25 years ago (right); still hangs in our kitchen.
The lawyer defending Coco Roco referred Evans to a December 2003 review of Coco Roco by Ray Chesterton, who "thought everything was great."
"He says he never met a meal he didn't like," the barrister also noted.
Justice Ian Hamilton then quipped: "That emerges from the photograph."
Hearty guffaws all around.
1,500 UK holidaymakers hit by food bug at six First Choice resorts
From the things-not-to-say-when-1,500-customers-have-barfed file:
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"Holiday Villages are all large properties and the reported level of illness is very low considering the large population."
The Mirror reports this morning that families staying at six of the most popular First Choice Holiday Villages have been hit by a deluge of gastric illnesses over the last three years.
Claims are being processed from people who stayed at the Spanish bases in the Costa del Sol and Majorca and also in Turkey, Egypt, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. At Sarigerme in Turkey more than 700 were taken ill this summer.
Yesterday First Choice told the Mirror that it is axing its Holiday Village resorts in Mexico and the Dominican Republic from next month. The three bugs mainly to blame are salmonella, often caused by food not being cooked or stored properly; campylobacter, from contamination and cryptosporidium, often the result of feces in water.
Warning: This sandwich may contain a gold earring
A Chicago man is suing McDonald's for injuries he sustained when he swallowed a gold earring that was in his sandwich.
The complaint asserts, among other things, that the sandwich "lacked any warning of the fact that it contained the gold earring" and that McDonald's "failed to prevent foreign objects not fit for human consumption, including but not limited to earrings, from being offered to the general public in the food being served."
First lawsuit filed in E. coli O157 outbreak linked to UK petting zoo
Solicitor Jill Greenfield said she was instructed by relatives of the "seriously ill" youngster to pursue a negligence claim against Godstone Farm in Surrey.
But she would not disclose her clients' names or the age of the child involved.
"We need to establish what went wrong and who if anyone is at fault. I would hope that the farm representatives and the Health Protection Agency (HPA) will agree to meet with me as soon as possible in order that I can establish the facts as quickly as possible.
"I have contacted both the farm and the HPA today suggesting a meeting this week and I wait to hear."
The HPA said eight children remained in hospital and 67 cases of E.coli have been linked to Godstone farm.
Poisoned diners start lawsuit against 'unapologetic' celebrity chef Blumenthal; response called 'pathetic'
The UK Health Protection Agency report into an outbreak of norovirus that felled 529 diners at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant on Sept. 10, 2009, clearly identified poor reporting and employees working while sick as contributing factors to the outbreak.
Blumenthal decided to ignore this and take to the Interwebs with his own revisionist version of what went wrong earlier this year.
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This has upset some of the victims, who are now taking Blumenthal to court.
This morning, London’s Daily Mail online reports many are furious that Mr Blumenthal has refused to pay a penny in compensation, and at least two legal firms have initiated legal action.
Television presenter Jim Rosenthal, who was sickened, called Blumenthal’s response, “pathetic.”
“He has basically attempted to re-write the HPA report and its conclusions in his favour. It is pathetic and a complete PR disaster. There isn’t even a hint of apology.
“At first I was extremely sympathetic to Heston Blumenthal, but the way this has been mishandled beggars belief. I could not believe what I was reading in this email – it was like we had been sent different reports. I am taking them to court and a lot of other people are too. A simple apology might have ended all this a long time ago.”
Mr Blumenthal’s spokesman said:
“We are reviewing the report, which we only received on September 10, and won’t comment until we have completed that review.”
But they did comment, on Sept. 10. Clueless.
Food lawsuit: Can a fly in salad cause illness? Can an e-mailer be sued for defamation?
A guy goes into a restaurant in Aurora, Ill., and says, “Waiter, there’s a fly in my salad.”
The guy has a burger instead and the restaurant, Walter Payton’ Roundhouse, picks up the bill.
The guy then goes home and sends an e-mail to some 300 people, stating,
“Health Warning: The Kane County Health Department will be conducting an on-site inspection of Walter Payton’s Roundhouse after several complaints about flies within meals. Please stay away until the Kane County Health Department issues their official findings.”
The Health Department apparently investigated the incident and found a small number of fruit flies around the bar.
Last week, America’s Brewing Co., which owns the restaurant, sued the guy for defamation, seeking more than $100,000.
Wolfgang Puck sued for crappy bathroom
Celebrity blog TMZ reports that celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck is being sued over a restaurant bathroom.
A woman claims she just wanted to take care of some toilet business during a lunch at Puck's most famous Beverly Hills restaurant, Spago back in 2007. But according to the lawsuit, filed in L.A. County Superior Court, the bathroom floor was covered in "standing pools of urine and feces" -- and the only usable toilet didn't have a lock on the door.
The woman also claims she had to use one of her hands to hold the door closed while she took care of business on the throne. But mid-squat, with her hand stuck firmly on the handle, another woman allegedly yanked the door open causing Linden to fall "face-first onto the tile floor."
Reps for Spago claim the woman is completely full of crap when it comes to the cleanliness of their bathrooms -- "In our 27 years of business we've never had an issue close to this ... that portion of the claim is totally without merit."
Wolfgang had some hepatitis A problems back in 2007.
Lawsuit alleges man gets 9-foot tapeworm from seafood restaurant
The first salmon Amy cooked for me – she caught me a delicious salmon – was damn near raw. Now, we cook it to about 125 F, checked using a tip-sensitive digital thermometer, and it warms up to 130-140 F in the minutes from grill to gullet.
Apparently that didn’t happen for Anthony Franz, who is suing the parent company of Shaw’s Crab House for causing him to become “violently ill” after eating undercooked salmon at the trendy River North restaurant.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports that the suit, filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court, claims Franz ate periodically at Shaw’s between May and August 2006 as part of a healthier diet.
For several days, Franz became violently ill and eventually passed a nine-foot long tapeworm, the suit said.
A suburban doctor he visited in late August said he got the tapeworm from eating undercooked fish. …
He claims in the two-count suit that the restaurant failed to supervise employees in safe food handling and allowed customers to eat food that was not safe to consume.
Raw and undercooked seafood continues to present risks. The N.Y. Times covered the issue of tapeworms in seafood in a 1981 article.
Stick it in.
Pigeon poop payoff
Fifty-six-year-old Shelton Stewart, a former New York doorman who slipped on a pile of pigeon droppings on a subway station's stairs in 1998, has been awarded $6 million in compensation.The New York Post reports that the trial took three weeks, but the jury took less than a day to award Stewart $7.67 million in damages. He'll get only 80 percent of that, or $6.13 million, because he was found 20 percent liable for failing to avoid the poop pile the second time around.
New York City Transit has indicated that it planned to appeal.
Stewart was planning to use his windfall to buy a house and take his two daughters and grandchild to Disney World in Florida.
The devil wears Prada?
Food safety lawsuits continue to pile up, at home and abroad.In Jordan, the family of a man who died after falling ill from eating a shawarma in a restaurant in Jordan has filed lawsuits against the restaurant’s owner and a hospital doctor who dealt with him before his death.
Bilal Jarwan, 23, was one of hundred of people struck down with salmonella poisoning after eating chicken shawarmas from a restaurant in the Baqaa refugee camp near Amman.
Father Abu Ramzi was quoted as telling newspaper The Jordan Times,
"The Jordanian judicial system is known for its integrity and we trust it will hold to account whoever was responsible for the death of my son."
Over two hundred cases of food poisoning were reported in the salmonella outbreak, leading the Jordanian government to ban shawarmas across the kingdom. The restaurant from where the outbreak originated, located around 27 kilometres northwest of Jordan’s capital, has now been closed and its owner and staff arrested. The owner is facing up to three years in prison and a fine.
Hospital response
In Chicago, Joel Parker is suing Pars Cove Persian Cuisine after his 16-year-old son ate hummus alleged to be contaminated with salmonella at the Taste of Chicago event.
According to the Chicago Health Department, as of last week, 790 people claimed they got salmonella after consuming food bought from the Pars Cove booth. Following laboratory testing, 182 of those cases were confirmed. In the latest news release from the health department, 38 people are known to have been hospitalized.
Love them or hate them, lawsuits seem to be a tool to hold food producers, marketers and retailers accountable, and keeps food safety stories in the news, perhaps raising the overall level of awareness and contributing to a culture that values microbiologically safe food.
