Taking a road trip can be exhausting and everybody needs a break every now and then to catch a bite to eat. But as ABC2 News Investigator Joce Sterman explains, the records for a popular truck stop in Howard County show they haven’t always been the cleanest place to stop.
When truckers tire of life on the open highway, they don't like to go far to find relief. And just off Interstate 95, those weary road warriors look for comfort at Country Pride. But if they looked at the inspection reports for this popular stop, they might just keep on trucking.
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. The pattern at this place involves a problem with cleaning along with critical violations for how they handle the food.
We took a trip to Country Pride to ask local management about their history, but we were told to contact their corporate spokesperson, who was out of town and unable to return our call.
Still, the records show this place has been consistently cited for sanitation issues with the worst coming in 2006 when the restaurant was given write-ups for extremely dirty walls, floors and equipment. Even the oil they use to fry your food was written up as a problem.
And those kinds of messes may have been too tempting for pests, like the flies and roaches that inspectors spotted in two inspections that year. Inspectors noted they were throughout the facility and even spotted some roaches crawling under the orange juice machine.
Things only got worse for this restaurant in 2007, when the roof literally started falling in on them. In fact, problems with the ceiling and sanitation issues kept this place closed for a couple of days. But ceiling tiles falling onto the buffet were a small thing to fix compared to the larger sanitation issues inspectors asked them to tackle.
Management were told the facility was very dirty, with heavy grease and dirt accumulated everywhere. And in 2008, inspectors again wrote up cleaning issues, calling out the restaurant for things like keeping moldy fruit and veggies on the prep table, not scrubbing the stained floors or dirty oven and finding rodent droppings and live ants in their storage room.
The facility is showing big improvement though. They were just inspected on March 17th and had no critical violations or cleaning issues.
