News today is the latest set of documents released by the Health Department pertaining to food poisoning complaints at Larchmont Bungalow.
The folks at LarchmontLA.com haven’t published the papers, citing all sorts of excuses (it’s hundreds of pages, files too big to upload to the site, have to blacken out personal information, etc. etc.).
Hmmph. It would be interesting to see how the new information provided by civil servants will jibe with what the consensus has privately been since the controversy surfaced in early March.
MY PERSONAL CONJECTURE
Larchmont Bungalow ran a Groupon deal even before their Living Social coupons expired. February 7th, they sold 4,340 Groupons entitling each to $30 worth of food for just $15.
As soon as the next weekend came along, these coupon bargain hunters flocked to Bungalow. No reservation system in place, so the line was literally out the door. It was so insanely packed a resident contemplated reporting it to the LAFD as a fire hazard.
The kitchen is small (Larchmont Bungalow wasn’t meant to be a restaurant with a seating capacity of 60+plus but was originally equipped to be just a takeout facility), so it couldn’t handle the deluge of customers.
Oh, and after customers started tweeting and posting on Yelp that the wait times for their orders were taking as long as an hour, someone decides… let’s prepare a lot more stuff in advance! That means “freshly prepared” ingredients had actually been sitting there for hours. It was so chaotic that ready orders were being left on the counter unattended. The EggsBennyTour experts were even served eggs benedict cold.
Mid-February, customers started getting cramps and diarrhea after eating at Larchmont Bungalow. As with most people who experience symptoms of food poisoning, they weather it out and then forget about it. But it occurred to one customer to leave a quick tip on Yelp on March 1st. And someone saw it and told someone, who told someone… who told Larchmonters on March 4th.
Do you think LarchmontLA published it right away, as they have a reputation for breaking news in a matter of minutes? No. They sat on the tip for days (the why of which is yet another story). When they did tweet about it, they had immediate responses that other people had gotten sick after eating at Larchmont Bungalow. And every time they tweeted about it, more people came forward.
Finally, finally! Someone posted on Facebook, “Hey, how many more people have to get sick before we call the health department?” Who calls? You? Me? Dilly-dally, shilly-shally… Ok, let’s ask the victims to call. Meanwhile, Los Angeles County is so understaffed they don’t send an investigator to the Bungalow until March 23rd.
The rest, as they say, you can read all over the internet.
DISCLAIMER (lest the Bungalow’s lawyers threaten me the way they’ve threatened LarchmontLA): The above paragraphs are a work of fiction, based on the March 23rd official report made by the County’s health investigator in response to food poisoning complaints.
And these pages: http://larchmontla.com/cc
http://koreanslate.com/larchmont-bungalow-food-poisoning.html
http://koreanslate.com/is-the-larchmont-bungalow-an-illegal-restaurant.html
To my dear readers, I hope you found my above-posted fictional work entertaining. Please refer to the original sources it was based on and form your own opinion, to which each of us is entitled. I’ll come up with another work of fiction after I’ve read more public records.
As for the Larchmonters, hurry up! Quit covering historical buildings and menu specials, and start publishing those documents. I want to write a better story!
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Groupon: 4,417 deals purchased on February 8, 2011
Expires August 8, 2011
1,863 Living Social coupons purchased on December 10, 2010
Expires June 10, 2011
1,556 Living Social coupons purchased on July 27, 2010
Expired January 27, 2011
341 Living Social coupons purchased on February 25, 2010
Expired August 25, 2010
Total: 8,177 “dine-in only” coupons since February 2010
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March 23 Email from LA County’s FBI Team (PDF)
