Ensuring a Healthy Appetite

A beautiful, clear white plaque on the counter of the Penguin Place yogurt shop in Los Alamitos shows customers that the eatery holds a “First Place” city rating.

Tell that to the cockroaches.

The place was closed for a day last month by county health officials. Employees said an inspector found two dead cockroaches in a back room. But the county’s Environmental Health Division report called it a “heavy cockroach infestation throughout the food storage and service areas.”

The places where we eat in public aren’t always as they appear.

To see these places as county health officials do, I took a look at all food establishment closings here for the month of January--

10, it turned out. All were reopened quickly because owners got serious about their problems so they could be back in business.

Four were closed for failure to make corrections from a previous health inspection--Sbarro’s Italian eatery at MainPlace/Santa Ana,

Williams Sonoma at the Brea Mall, the Paradise Coffee Shop in San Clemente and the Nha Hang So 9 Vietnamese restaurant in Garden Grove.

The restaurant at Irvine Lanes suffered “heavy rodent infestation” on inspection day. Sewage backup led to closings for the Great Wall Gourmet Express in Brea, Starbuck’s Coffee in Laguna Beach and a Carl’s Jr. on Culver Drive in Irvine.

The 10th was Marta’s Pizza and Panaderia in Stanton; a small ventilation system fire had left soot everywhere.

A county health closing generally means a place needs to clean up its act, said Bill Ford, who oversees these inspections. But exceptions exist.

“You can be running a fine restaurant and have a one-day problem,” Ford said.

One-day problems can bring attention you don’t want. In reviewing previous reports on Marta’s, I found a notice that it “is repeatedly receiving violations for floor dust, dirt, grease and unsanitary conditions.”

The Nha Hang So 9 restaurant was cited for storing food in large, plastic laundry detergent buckets. That’s all too common, Ford said: “Chemical residue from those buckets can’t be seen but can still get in the food.”

The restaurant in December was hit with 10 major and seven minor health code violations--far too many, Ford said, and legal action might have been the next step.

But new owners have since taken over the restaurant and changed the name, to Bun Bo Hue Gia Hoi. They won’t be judged on what happened there before.

Penguin Place employees consider it unfair to receive publicity for a temporary closing. “Just look around our place,” one of them said. “Look how clean we are. We fumigate every month.”

Maybe so. But, interestingly, health inspectors found cockroach evidence there on two previous inspections too.

The complaint at Sbarro’s is high on the county’s priority list: food kept at inadequate temperatures. The health code requires it to be under 41 degrees or over 140 degrees.

Kambiz Hernan, Sbarro’s manager, complained that previous health inspectors had not been so picky.

“We reheat the pizza before we give it to the customer,” he said.

But health officials said he’s missing the point. Before the pizza is reheated, there is the risk of bacteria forming if the temperature isn’t kept hot enough.

Yes, these health inspectors are picky. And we, the dining public, ought to be glad they are.