Mold on tuna salad and over 100 flies: Fort Lauderdale restaurant filth
When “Ol’Days” isn’t just your restaurant name but also describes how long some food has been sitting around, expect the kind of state inspection that the Fort Lauderdale business received last week.
Ol’Days Farm to Table was shut down Wednesday and Thursday after a failed routine inspection and follow-up inspection. The restaurant, on the first floor of a commercial building at 200 E. Las Olas Blvd., passed another re-inspection Thursday and was back open for Friday’s breakfast rush.
But that was after the inspection failures on Wednesday and Thursday, the former of which saw eight High Priority violations among 19 violations.
Ol’Days had some too-old ready-to-eat tuna salad, date marked May 1 and May 2. This inspection was July 9. So, each batch exceeded the seven-day time limit by two months. On one, the inspector “observed mold growth on top....”
Stop sale on the tuna salad and on the hummus made on May 14.
Raw beef and ready-to-eat chicken were stored in the same pan. Any contact between those can transfer foodborne bacteria.
In addition, the inspection found five dead roaches at the cookline at the corner of an oven.
The kitchen could have been in the Amityville Horror house with 85 flies counted on the ceiling and wall of the food exposition area at the kitchen entrance and 20 flies inside the kitchen. Among those were flies landing on a clean wine glass, clean dish plate, to-go plates, to-go bags and a waffle iron, and seven flies zipping around glassware.
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A cookline shelf with clean plates qualified as a “nonfood-contact surface soiled with grease, food debris, dirt, slime or dust.”
“Temperature abuse” — keeping food in “cold” storage, but not at or under 41 degrees — brought down stop sales on quinoa, coco cream, cheese and cut tomatoes.
In the walk-in cooler, the inspectors found “visibly soiled cardboard lining shelves with canned and bottled drinks.”
Anyone using the front handwash sink would have to bring their own soap and paper towels.
Wet wiping cloths are supposed to be kept in a sanitzing solution between uses. These were “stored in degreaser and sanitizer mixed together” except for the cookline mix. That measured zero parts per million on the sanitizer.
Thursday’s first re-inspection got scuttled by three dead roaches in the same place on the cookline, and nine flies. And the inspector found cooked onions that had been in the house since June 25, one week longer than permitted. stop sale on those onions.
This story was originally published July 14, 2025 at 1:10 PM.
