ROSEMEAD>>Flies trailed a waitress as she dragged a cart full of dirty dishes through the dining room and into the kitchen at Jade BBQ & Seafood Restaurant.
It was around 7 p.m. on a Tuesday in May. The Chinese restaurant was relatively empty, save for a group of elderly men eating on an outdoor patio, their eyes glued to a TV screen as the Cleveland Cavaliers took the lead over the Chicago Bulls in the Eastern Conference semifinals.
A few takeout customers stopped by the buffet line, where chafing dishes full of shrimp and chow mein hung off the edge of the steam table.
“My dad likes to have a lot of different varieties for our customers — that’s where we clash,” said owner Emily Lieng of the voluminous quantities of food sitting out on the buffet.
According to a Los Angeles News Group review of 21 months of food facility inspection data from the Los Angeles County Public Health Department, over the course of seven routine inspections, the Rosemead restaurant at 7808 Garvey Ave. logged the most public health violations — 77 — of any other in the county.
But despite repeated public health threats, the eatery had its permit suspended only once under a grading system that allows too many facilities to operate with major health threats and doesn’t disclose actual kitchen operating conditions.
Prompted by the review of the data by this news organization, county officials are considering ways to improve the widely emulated letter-grading system. A report to the county Board of Supervisors on the system’s problems and potential fixes is due next week.
In July 2014, the health department shut Jade BBQ & Seafood down for three days when flies were found inside a container of noodles and throughout the kitchen. The restaurant was also cited for having more than 40 pounds of cooked food held at room temperature at the steam table and leaving raw duck in a dirty walk-in cooler.
Acknowledging one of the restaurant’s continual violations — not keeping cooked food at proper temperatures, the most common public health threat in the county — Lieng explained that sometimes extra dishes are left on the steam table, making it impossible for consistent and proper heating.
The restaurant was cited four times for that problem, according to the data.
“(My dad is) just trying to please everybody,” she said. “We’re trying our best to work together and not have that issue anymore.”
The health department data include routine and owner-initiated inspections conducted between July 1, 2013, and March 31, 2015, of restaurants in the county of Los Angeles except for the cities of Long Beach, Pasadena and Vernon.
Ten days after the restaurant’s permit was reinstated following the suspension last July, the health department replaced the C grade it received during the regular check-in with an A grade earned during an owner-initiated inspection.
Less than three months later, a county health inspector lowered that to a B after observing repeated violations of cooked chicken sitting in a steam table at an improper temperature, as well as three minor violations.
The inspector determined that while a permit suspension was not in order, a re-inspection was needed to ensure the issues were corrected. But that re-inspection was never done, records show.
The restaurant again has an A grade, received during a regular inspection in December, but it has not been inspected in about six months.
“Our employees are just kind of lazy. I think they just need more leadership within our business to keep us going,” said Lieng, 26, who took over the family business three years ago. Until recently, she had two other jobs and wasn’t around the restaurant that much.
Now that she has more time, Lieng wants to improve employee education regarding health and sanitation standards. The difficulty, she said, is that most of her employees are immigrants and speak little to no English.
The health department does not distribute training materials in Chinese, but officials are available by request to provide in-person training in Chinese.
“It’s really different from if you were to come here from China and (suddenly) have to deal with more code of conduct within a restaurant,” Lieng said of the challenge in instituting consistency. “They’re just not used to it.”
