Australia: Restaurant owner sues food critic for bad review
This Christmas I will be venturing to Australia for the first time. My flatmate graciously invited me to spend the holidays with her, and the chance to potentially bump into Mr. G (Summer Heights High) was something I couldn’t pass up.
While I search for the famous mockumentry star, a Sydney restaurateur will likely be continuing her ugly legal battle against a food critic reports TheAge.com.au.
In evidence in the NSW Supreme Court on Wednesday, Ljiljana Gacic sobbed as she launched a diatribe against the critic, Matthew Evans, whom she described as "low life".
She said the review had been "done for a purpose", and told Justice Ian Harrison she had put on 57 kilos in the six years since its publication because of the stress.
In September 2003, Fairfax's The Sydney Morning Herald published a review referring to "unpalatable" dishes, describing the restaurant's overall value as "a shocker" and scoring it 9/20 - in the "stay home" category. The restaurant went into administration in March 2004.
The article has been found to convey defamatory meanings, including that the trio "incompetent" as restaurant owners because they sold unpalatable food and employed a chef who made poor quality dishes.
Mr [Tom] Blackburn [ SC, for Fairfax – the newspaper] then suggested that either Ms Gacic was "malevolently and maliciously fabricating it or you are deluded".
The judge is now holding a hearing relating to defences - including truth - put forward by Fairfax, and on the amount of damages, if any, which should be awarded.
Aye mate, there's an app for that!
Whether it’s a personal poop tracking system or toilet locations you’re after it seems there’s an iPhone app for that. The latest in cool apps is a restaurant inspection disclosure application developed for New South Wales in Australia, reports the Sydney Morning Herald Online.
A new iPhone app will tell you if a nearby restaurant has been fined for breach of food safety standards. The application, FoodWatch NSW, brings the Food Authority's name-and-shame list to your fingertips by using the iPhone's GPS to show you a list of restaurants near your location that have been added to the list.
The tool gives the user the ability to view the list any time, wherever the user is.
Some of the main features include a map where one can view, pan and zoom around to all the nearby penalised restaurants. And just like the Food Authorities' name and shame list, it won't show penalties that are older than 12 months…
Chief executive officer of the company that generated the app, Keith Ahern, said
"While I think a lot of restaurants aren't happy about it [the list], you can see the information and make your own decision.”
The free app uses information from the NSW Food Authority website, located here.
Let's throw another shrimp on the barbie!
Food service food safety failures made public in Sydney; public benefits
The Sydney Morning Herald this morning – this being Sunday morning in Australia – has a huge feature on the effects of the New South Wales state Food Authority taking a more, uh, vigilant approach to restaurant inspections.
The newspaper concludes that 40 per cent of all restaurants, takeaways and other food businesses in NSW were caught breaching one or more of the critical food handling practices when first visited by an inspector.
That may not be an entirely fair representation. Lots of places have at least one critical violation, and in the U.S., how a critical violation is defined can differ from state-to-state, and even county-to-county. There needs to be some sort of control or comparative group to determine whether that number is high or not.
But it sure sounds gross.
Inspection rates are woefully inadequate in some local councils, and there is often a lack of follow-up.
Anna Cenfi, part-owner of the Belli Bar, got it right when she said inspections conducted in the past few months were more thorough than in previous years, but that she had received three letters warning that a food safety inspection was imminent.
"I think that warning people that they are coming to inspect is ridiculous. They should just spot check everyone, even if it's just once a year. I'm not worried for myself but I know a lot of dodgy places out there."
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Journalist Mathew Moore does clearly state that whatever the limitations, “making this information public we can now expect improvements in standards that transparency and public scrutiny of government information can bring. The Food Authority deserves praise for releasing this information and giving the public far more data than it can get in any other state. It's an important addition to the name and shame list … With its website and release of the statewide data, NSW has gone further than any other state.
“Yet it still lags behind many cities in Britain and the US, where the results of every restaurant inspection are posted online. New York City even allows consumers to search restaurants according to their number of violation points.
“Governments there have learnt what the NSW Government is now only beginning to realise; there are major public health benefits in shining a public light into the kitchens of every food business that serves the public.”
