Today is apparently Star Wars Day, thanks to some questionable wordplay that wasn't all that good at first and really started to grate after we heard "May the Fourth be with you" an additional ten times. Despite all the excitement, health inspections continued as normal all week leading up to the big day. The thrilling results:
The Junction Bar and Grill (160 W. Gray) recorded a couple minor violations during an inspection Thursday. The wall/ceiling was considered in poor repair, and the handwashing sink didn't issue cold water. The karmic spreadsheet still shows a positive balance in favor of Junction; someone did the universe a favor by changing the bar's name from The Wet Spot, and whoever is responsible for the switch should earn some health department indulgences. Mixing religion metaphors, on the other hand, puts us somewhere between the circle of hell where that guy is doomed to eat the other guy's head for eternity and the circle that holds people who name bars shit like "The Wet Spot."
When an establishment earns four violations, it's usually not a big deal - at least a couple are bound to be boring transgressions like improperly sized plumbing or an employee drinking something around food (shock, horror). Mimi Worldwide Food (8230 W. Orem), however, efficiently hit most of the nastier inspection points in just four moves - food not protected from contamination, effective anti-pest measures not taken, accumulated dust/dirt/debris and dirty floors. We weren't even sure what Mimi is, so we looked it up and found it's a manufacturer and distributor of African foods. The inspector didn't issue a citation, so despite the violations, the fufu's probably fine.
Kompany Kids (2030 Post Oak), a day care center near the Galleria, earned two violations. One was for improperly adjusted equipment components. The other was for using cloth materials as a food-contact surface. All right, have you ever been to a day care center as an adult? We have a friend, now a hotshot reporter at a paper we'll call the Houston Business Diary, who found out that his childhood swimming hole in Crosby, Texas, was contaminated by runoff from a Superfund site. We would rather swim in that water - possibly with shirtless Crosbyites - than spend more than five minutes breathing day care center air. We're just saying, maybe health inspectors dealing with day cares should ask one question instead of performing a full inspection. Does the center at least vaguely resemble something in a first-world country? If so, PASS.
Reason we're being mistaken for a sexual deviant this week: Caudillo's Ice Cream appears to be a mobile food unit; you can tell because it was inspected at the city's mobile-unit inspection facility at 7411 Park Place. (The inspection turned up no violations.) We tried to Google the name and accidentally ended up looking at some teenager's MySpace pictures of him and his friends eating ice cream. A co-worker walked by in the three seconds it was on our screen. Trying to explain just makes it worse.
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