One last note on the various restaurant inspections available online from the public health department of Seattle & King county - Tutta Bella has had a bit of a spotty record over the past few months.
It seems that each of their last two inspections have found a critical violation - they don't have their refrigerators turned down low enough.
The description of a critical violation states that "Environmental Health Specialists work with operators to make sure that red critical violations are corrected before they leave the establishment." So in this case, they turn down the refrigerator temperature.
So which employee at Tutta Bella thought it would be a good idea, between October 2nd of last year and January 8th of this year, to turn the refrigerator back up so it wasn't keeping the food cold and safe anymore?
3 comments:
There's a little more to it than that! Having worked in restaurants and gone through plenty of inspections, inspectors check the very tip of exposed product, not just the internal temperature of the coolers. If product on top of the workstation (not the entire pan of product, but the very tip of one piece of food) isn't at 41 degrees or lower...you can get dinged. Not 45 or 44 degrees, 41. I'll bet that this is the case. The actual holding temp of the entire cooler can be icy cold, its a challenge to keep the stuff on top the same temp too.
Dear Captain,
I would like to thank the previous anonymous poster for making a point about inspections. As the owner of Tutta Bella, I can say with 100% certainty that my restaurant practices safe food handling. Since opening in January 2005, we have received numerous perfect scores from the health department. The inspections you refer to in your original post both occurred after lunch rushes when the line cooks had just switched out to newly sanitized food pans, a ritual we practice twice a day. These fresh pans were not chilled and had a temporary impact on the content temperature. Our inspector suggested that we refrigerate the pans before switching, a suggestion that we now practice. Our commitment to safe food handing in very strong; King County featured the restaurant in a training video and recognized Tutta Bella as exemplary in sanitation and safe food handling.
There are 11 refrigeration units in the restaurant, The compressors are cleaned out monthly, refrigerant levels are inspected on a regular basis, and temperatures of food are taken twice per day.
Joe Fugere
As the Chef of Tutta Bella Columbia City I have been working very closely with the Health Department and our inspector to make sure that all food is safe and to temp. The last thing that I want to do as a culinary professional is to make my patrons sick. The refigeration unit that you speak of has been regulary maintained and as the anynomous poster stated the health inspectors are very critical and often only temp the very top of a holding pan.
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