It's gotten rave reviews for its cuisine, making it one of the most popular restaurants in Columbia. But the people who judge its health record may see things a little differently.
ABC2 News Investigator Joce Sterman has more on why Mirchi Wok won't be getting five stars from the health department.
It's a restaurant that serves up royal Indian cuisine. But records show Mirchi Wok may not be fit for a king. Instead, three years worth of health inspection reports show this Columbia eatery has a history of sanitation problems.
We're going neighborhood by neighborhood, looking at places with the biggest number of violations and the consistent patterns we've seen in reports dating back to 2006.
And this place has a few specific patterns that might gross you out, including a faulty dishwasher that hasn’t been firing out hot enough water. It's been mentioned in six inspections since 2000, leaving customers using potentially dirty dishes.
We asked owner, Rohit Chawla, about the problem and he told us, "If you read the reports properly you'll see it was about the water temperature coming into the machine. It's not broken, it's fine."
But the machine wasn't fine until after the Howard County Health Department shut the restaurant down back in December. It took the closure to finally fix the washer and to get Chawla to change the happenings in his kitchen, which has been repeatedly cited for cleaning issues.
In inspections from 2006, Chawla was told to clean and sanitize the heavily soiled floor to keep rodents away. And in 2007 and 2008, he racked up more violations for lagging cleanliness, with violations for things like wok stoves encrusted with food, sticky shelving units, rodent droppings and a need for cleaning the entire kitchen.
Chawla blames the dirt on inspections conducted during the busy rush of meal prep. And he also believes the inspector has been out to get him since an argument in July of 2007. He tells ABC2, "Ever since that day she's been totally after me. She wants to flag me for every small thing. If she's misusing the power, I can't do much about it."
Chawla didn't do much about many of those dirty items mentioned in his record, even after that shut down in December. During a reinspection that month, the health inspector found many dirty items, including dirty, bloody pots and pans stored with clean items, extremely dirty walls and large rodent droppings in the kitchen.
The owner says a faulty roof gave those critters access. But he says that’s been fixed along with the dishwasher. He tells us it’s all part of an effort to put their problems in the past. The health department says Chawla has been cooperating with the agency since his restaurant’s closure.
