PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. — The downtown West Palm Beach restaurant industry is showing support for a fellow restaurant that had a worker test positive for hepatitis A in April.
Several downtown eateries represented at the dinner table Wednesday at The Butcher Shop in downtown West Palm Beach to show the public that it is safe to eat there.
“We are descending on the Butcher Shop just bringing love with us,” said Kerri Powers, GM of Kapow.
Inside the local restaurant industry, news of a worker diagnosed with hep. A at the Butcher Shop sent reverberations throughout.
“I thought it was so unfortunate, I saw it on the news, I could only imagine what this could do for business,” said Scott Frielich, the VP of the Subculture Restaurant Group, which has several eateries and bars in West Palm Beach.
“I just realized it could happen to us. I realized there’s nothing we can do, or any other restaurants can do differently to prevent this. We’re not scanning, we’re not doing blood tests when we hire employees,” Frielich said.
The Butcher Shop said the dishwasher didn’t come in contact with food. Still, business took a hit and management took action.
“Everybody’s been through retraining, we’ve cleaned the place from top to bottom, this could have happened to anybody, but we want to make sure that we’re a leader in the industry of food safety sanitary practices to this doesn’t happen again,” said The Butcher Shop General Manager Jim Febraro.
“They’re one of our neighbors and it’s a great asset to the downtown area,” Powers said.
“It so nice to have the support of everyone,” Febraro said. “Please come back and give us a try because we’ve really retrained everybody, and we’re doing some good things.”
