The Restaurant Report - Part 4
posted 11:50 pm Thu November 20, 2008
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Across the ABC 13 Viewing Area -
Live roaches, rodent droppings, food at dangerously wrong temperatures -- Inspectors found all of these violations in October in restaurants in our area. In our final Restaurant Report, an inside look at a kitchen with major problems and the only fast food restaurant on our list.
Pittsylvania County's worst scorer in October was Napoli's Pizza in Gretna. Inspectors found six critical violations. Owners here would not speak to us on camera. But they did let us in to get a little bit of video and to look around. First, we went to the upstairs storage area.
Shelley - "So this building's pretty old?"
That's where inspectors found evidence of rodents, including droppings and a chewed up cup.
Shelley - "She said she found something over there."
We didn't find anything during our visit.
Dan Richardson, Pittsylvania/Danville Health District - "It depends on where we see the evidence or where we see that rodent and it depends on the quantity of rodent droppings also."
Fortunately, the droppings were not near a food prep area. But in the kitchen, the inspector saw couple of live roaches near the sink. We didn't see any. We did ask, though, about the dishwasher that had no sanitizer.
Shelley - "What's new? What's been added?"
They've now hooked up a new container.
In Roanoke County, the Bojangles in Vinton had eight critical violations during their October inspection. They weren't cooking their fried chicken to the right temperature. Their grilled chicken fillets were being held about 15 degrees too cool. And, employees were not washing their hands in between glove changes.
We hear the same thing from almost every owner on my list -- that they've corrected all of their violations and don't understand why I would do a report. But the bottom line is, these restaurants wouldn't have known what to fix if the inspector didn't point out the problems.
Richardson - "We're not in the business of going in there and saying okay, you fixed it, that's fine, we're going to wink at it and go on. It is a violation and how long it's been going on in the past, we don’t know."
The Wendy's in Appomattox had a perfect score in October, no critical or non critical violations. Please keep in mind that the health official we talked to in this story is not speaking specifically about any restaurant's inspection report.
Click here if you want to know more about area restaurants by keeping tabs yourself.
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