Who knew when we woke up early Monday morning such a week was in store for us?
It started with a 6am report on KLAS-TV about Firefly closing “voluntarily” because of “a few reported incidents of food poisoning.”
Our staff immediately smelled a rat (actually p.r. spin, read: poppycock) and prompted ELV to say so on this Website.
From there, things escalated quickly.
Continue reading “Gourmet Vegan Tops Microbial, Macrobiotic Week for ELV”
ELV note: Yours truly is not in the habit of suing restaurants. We love restaurants, chefs, cooks and restaurateurs. We also know that anyone can get food poisoning any time at any place (you could, conceivably, get a bad clam at Joel Robuchon), and a single incident of illness would not be actionable, as we say in the law. But over three dozen incidents from a single establishment in one week is beyond the pale. So many illnesses in so short of time manifests practiced negligence on the part of management. Therefore, as a public health service, we hereby offer the following commercial.
ELV has become so well known as a restaurant critic that some people (including the Food Gal®, his long suffering assistant, and his accountant) forget that he is also a lawyer, as in: he practices law.
For money.
He’s pretty damn good at it too — having accumulated decades of experience in numerous facets of the profession (civil, injury, business, litigation, criminal, domestic, corporate, and real estate).
He is also well-versed in the nuances of divorce law and will happily help those who need to unwind the knot with a significant other.
And by “unwind the knot with a significant other” he means he will happily refer you to an attorney who specializes in human behavior at its worst. (High powered business executives and incarcerated felons are pieces of cake next to a housewife who caught her husband boinking the au pair.)
With this in mind, he is using this space, at his accountant’s suggestion to remind his loyal readers that there could be gold in them thar hills against the business that made them very sick. Any who were injured should feel free to contact him at:
John A. Curtas
Attorney-at-Law
3275 South Jones Blvd. Suite 105
Las Vegas, NV 89146
702.307.9500
john@curtaslaw.com (see our classy ad – with Greek columns and everything! – in the box on the right below)
….where he will happily refer you to competent legal representation.
But wait there’s more!
As a further public service, any who retain him will be happily steered to a tapas restaurant that won’t send them to the hospital.
It turns out the Southern Nevada Health District was standing there with a padlock after all. As reported late yesterday, the SNHD shuttered the restaurant last Friday after more than thirty people became ill after eating there.
KSNV-TV News 3 added details to the story, stating over thirty-six (yes, that’s 3-6, three dozen) became sick and ten had to be hospitalized.
The veritable cherry on top of the microbe sundae was provided by Yahoo! News, that labeled Firefly both “trendy” (when? 2004?) and the racker up of hundreds of rave reviews on Yelp. The article went on to say that John Simmons, Firefly’s owner, was “horrified” that his bastion of bacteria had made people sick — conveniently ignoring the fact that the same place was closed less than two years ago by the Health Department for numerous hygiene-related violations.*
All of which led ELV to think to himself: “Self, don’t ever be swayed by the haters and doubters again. When you said you smelled the stench of p.r. spin (when the owners were weakly claiming they “voluntarily” closed the place), you called it a crock and that’s what it was.”
(ELV hates being right all the time, but he hopes you’re getting used to it by now.)
Continue reading “FIREFLY Owner Shocked, SHOCKED Restaurant Makes People Sick”