Time for the Supervisors to vote for letter grade restaurant health ratings?

Supervisor Janet Nguyen cast the key vote against the letter grading system for restaurants.   I broke the news afterwards that O.C. Supervisor Janet Nguyen’s husband, Tom Bonikowski, owned a Lee’s Sandwiches franchise in Stanton that had been fined many times by the O.C. HCA.  She never reported that when she voted against the letter grade ratings – and it blew up in the press.  Bonikowski has since sold the restaurant.  Nguyen also collected, at the time, over $25,000 from owners of other restaurants that had been fined repeatedly for food safety violations.   

If you want to know if a restaurant has had food safety issues you have to look online – there is no notice posted at the restaurant.  If they are shut down at best they will post a notice saying that they have been shut down, and then a new notice saying that they have been cleared to reopen – but no details are offered at the restaurant.  And a week later, if you visit the restaurant, you will never know they had an issue – unless you knew to look them up online, according to the OC Safety News.

“Sometime in April of 2012, nine customers at an Orange County restaurant got sick after eating lettuce laced with Escherichia coli, the deadly, dreaded bacterium better known as E. coli. The lettuce came from Amazing Coachella Inc. of Coachella, and their poisoned product also struck eaters in Canada, where the outbreak was a national story. The OC restaurant was the only other culprit; it closed for a couple of days, then opened, and that was that,” according to the OC Weekly.

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