The Press Herald has published another article about restaurant inspections in Portland,

[President of the Maine Restaurant Association Dick] Grotton said Portland restaurants, many of which are in old buildings, are being cited for facility issues, such as not having a covered trash recetacle in the ladies room.

Instead of focusing on what are considered non-critical violations, he said, the city should concentrate on critical violations that could lead to illness.

“There are degrees of bad,” he said. “We need to separate what’s really important and what’s just part of the code.”

MPBN also interviewed Groton about the restaurant inspection process,

But Dick Grotton, president of the Maine Restaurant Association, says the records alone don’t provide a complete picture – mainly because some of the violations have nothing to do with food safety. Grotton spoke with MPBN’s Jennifer Mitchell.

The full Maine Food Code is available online on Maine.gov.

Today’s Press Herald widens their reporting on restaurant health inspections. Based on city documents they found that,

In August 2011, Portland hired its first health inspector devoted to restaurants. Since then, the inspector, Michele Sturgeon, has inspected 49 restaurants and failed 39 of them. Six failed initial follow-up inspections and three failed multiple follow-ups. In general, a restaurant fails if it has more than 13 violations.

There’s a report that the state has criticized “Portland officials Thursday for allowing the owner of [The Porthole] to cook a lobster dinner for a wedding reception in a kitchen that had been closed for health code violations.”

The Press Herald has published another article in its continuing coverage of the health inspection issues at The Porthole.

Less than a month before the Porthole was shut down for health code violations, the city’s health inspector documented 28 violations at the waterfront restaurant but allowed it to stay open.