Florida restaurant inspectors stayed busy last month collecting fines from Tampa Bay restaurants. You can see all of them on our August map, just posted at Fined Dining
The state pocketed $36,800 from 50 Tampa Bay eateries in August, compared to $26,325 from 35 restaurants in July and $18,050 from 26 Tampa Bay restaurants in June.
The top three penalties were $4,000 against Los Mariaches on Ulmerton Road, in Largo, $2,500 against O’Brien’s Irish Pub on N. Dale Mabry in Tampa, and $1,900 against TJ’s Gourmet Pizza Cafe in Indian Rocks Beach.
This month we decided to take the state’s search tool out for a spin to see whether we could match up details with fines (we’ve included a link to the state search tool at Fined Dining to make it easier for you to do the same thing).
We plugged in the three restaurants mentioned above and it worked like a charm on two of them. We drew a blank trying to find TJ’s Gourmet Pizza Cafe by name. We even copied it straight out of the state’s file and pasted it into the search tool. Nada. So we went back and got the license number and BINGO. Goddamn computers.
Anyway, we learned that inspectors found pink slime inside the ice machine at Los Mariaches, slime buildup inside the soda-gun holster at the bar and a few other things that kind of make us want to stay home and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner - as long as it’s not Peter Pan.
Over at O’Brien’s they found raw animal food stored over ready-to-eat food, the always-popular and charming slime buildup on soda dispensing nozzles, and a manager lacking proof of proper certification as a food manager. Is that what they mean when they speak of “the Irish curse?”
At TJ’s they found an accumulation of debris both inside and outside the “warewashing machine” (we’re guessing that’s the dishwasher), a soiled microwave oven interior, several walls soiled with accumulated food debris but - hey - no slimy soda dispensers.
Remember - consult Fined Dining any time you’re even thinking about going out to eat. We’ve got all the Florida restaurant fines going back to January 1, 2005, a map of the 50 most-fined in Florida and monthly maps for Tampa Bay.