One restaurant, three failed inspections, 31 live roaches and 63 dead ones
With state employees getting Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off, there were fewer inspections for South Florida restaurants to fail and make the Sick and Shut Down List.
Alas, one not only still managed to fail its inspection, but managed to pull off a hat trick of failure.
What follows comes from Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation restaurant inspections. If you see a problem in a restaurant and you want it checked, don’t email us. Click here and file a complaint. We don’t control who gets inspected or how strictly. We report without passion or prejudice, but with a take-home bag of humor.
In alphabetical order:
Pollo Tipico, 5011 S. State Rd. 7, Davie: Which is creepier? About 17 live roaches, including two in a bag under takeout containers and six in a flip top condenser panel? Or, 29 dead roaches in a glue trap near the ice machine and another 15 roach corpses in the crack of a wall next to the ice machine?
(Wonder if any got into the ice machine, thinking they’d escaped the glue trap and the crack, only to feel shattered by the cool caress preceding death’s chilly touch.)
With that many roaches scurrying about, do you really want to know about the bucket of peeled plantains stored on the kitchen floor or the box of tripe stored on the floor of the walk-in freezer? Well, now you know (Yo, Slick, blow...).
The hot water at the employee handwash sink wasn’t up to the temperature of any of the other handwash sinks. Speaking of water, there wasn’t just standing water, but “standing murky water” at the bottom of a flip top cooler and a low boy cooler.
Stop Sales got dropped on the oxtail and the pork chunks, neither of which got properly cooled enough overnight to keep them from being bacteria boats.
When the inspector came back Saturday, only four dead roaches lay about and nine scurried about. The grease still accumulated behind the stove and the gap in the exterior door that essentially acts as a welcome sign to crawling critters were enough to keep Pollo Tipico closed over the weekend. Strike two.
Monday, Pollo finished striking out. Four live roaches scurried around gaskets, one under the prep table and one “crawling across the menu board at the front counter.” The dead count reached 15, including nine in freezer or cooler gaskets. Today, Pollo Tipico is still closed. Except for the gap in the door.
This story was originally published December 30, 2019 at 12:33 PM.
