September 8, 2009
Should sewage be served warm or cold?
It’s enough to make you feel sick. Apparently an outbreak of norovirus which struck down more than 500 diners at Heston Blumenthal’s award-winning Fat Duck restaurant was caused in part by raw shellfish which may have been contaminated with human sewage, an official report concludes.
The “culinary alchemist” temporarily shut the three Michelin star restaurant in February for more than two weeks after about 40 diners complained they had fallen ill. A total of 529 customers fell ill with vomiting and diarrhoea. Maybe they should rename it the vomiting duck.
Now I may be wrong about this, but giving over 500 customers food poisoning may indicate more than a dodgy oyster or two. Maybe tucking in to snail porridge and other pretentious shit is fairly akin to eating sewage anyway.
I am not a great fan of cookery programmes on television, but Blumenthal’s series on making a pig’s ear of well-know dishes was comedy of the highest kind. All the better because the pretentious git had no idea just how hilarious his culinary antics are.
The investigation by the Health Protection Agency (HPA) found the norovirus brought into the restaurant by contaminated shellfish was partly to blame for the scale of the outbreak.
Investigators concluded that this, combined with ailing restaurant staff and the use of unsuitable cleaning products, exacerbated the impact of the outbreak.
The report into the restaurant, in Bray, Berkshire, said: “The organism responsible was norovirus. The norovirus was probably introduced via shellfish because diners who ate shellfish dishes were more likely to report illness; oysters were served raw; razor clams may not have been appropriately handled or cooked; tracing of the shellfish to source showed evidence for contamination; and outbreaks of illness in other establishments have been associated with oysters from the same source.”
Health inspectors traced the oysters to a supplier in Essex, which was potentially linked to several other outbreaks of the bug.
Responding to the report a Fat Duck spokesman said: “We are glad that the report has finally been published and draws a conclusion to the closure of The Fat Duck and more importantly that the norovirus has been identified as the cause and not due to any lapse in our strict food preparation processes.”
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