FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Food

I Went on a Tour of Some of England's Most Unhygienic Restaurants

Just how much of a risk are you taking by eating at a place with a bad health rating?

Photos by Chris Bethell

If you're thinking of opening a restaurant, your number-one priority is probably to avoid poisoning anyone in the process. The UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) is the government body charged with ensuring that Britain's restaurateurs don't subject their customers to days on a hospital drip for food-borne illness. If any eatery falls short of this minimum requirement through terrible hygiene, the FSA takes action to close it down. The agency provides a UK-wide scoring list of nearly every eatery in the country. Scanning the list for the places you like to eat at when you’re drunk can be something of an eye-opener—and an appetite suppressant.

Advertisement

Like every city, Liverpool is not immune to crappy restaurants serving food made in unsanitary conditions. In February 2013, Liverpool's Buffet Star Chinese closed after a rash of horror stories. Reports told of rat feces in the food-storage areas and raw eggs and defrosting meat placed next to cooked produce. Pictures of cooking areas with grease and rat shit everywhere showed that, despite the famous saying, what you don’t know actually can hurt you. This year, Shangri-La, a well-established dim sum dive, had its doors bolted for good owing to an infestation of German cockroaches first discovered back in October 2012. For those of you keeping score, yes, there were rat feces there as well.

Hovering precariously above the point where the FSA needs to forcibly shut them down are establishments that have been given an unappetizing “zero” rating for hygiene. According to the agency, these “are likely to have a history of serious problems,” but they're still free to serve food. Despite the horror stories, checking restaurant hygiene ratings isn’t something that most people do. But just how much of a risk are you taking by eating at a badly rated place? Does poor hygiene mean the food will taste bad? I decided to put my stomach on the line and find out with a gastronomic tour of Liverpool’s zero-rated eating establishments.

“How can a newsstand get a zero rating?” is a question I’ve asked myself a lot over the past week, but PRM, situated right by Liverpool’s Lime Street station, has managed it. It’s popular with students owing to its free-to-use cash machine, which is pretty much its main attraction.

Advertisement

A quick root around led me to a cabinet housing baguettes. They looked pretty limp. I did my pilgrimage two days ago, and the "use-by" dates suggested that if I came back two days later, the same ones might still be there, presumably with slightly browner lettuce. Other than that, nothing seemed untoward here. The floors were clean and had that typical newsstand smell.

The place got its zero rating on January 17, nine months ago, but PRM looked no different from any other newsstand. Perhaps next time the inspectors will give it a better mark. That said, for a place to score zero when it mostly deals in sealed and delivered goods was worrying.

I went for the turkey salad option and hoped it would be safe. An inquiry made to the FSA revealed that there is no template for dealing with a zero rating. It all depends on the specific problems and how the local authorities deal with them, so as I took my first bite, I didn't know what I was getting into, adding a shiver of unpredictability. Was I swallowing something full of parasites that were going to eat my insides? I just didn't know.

My first mouthful contained dry meat mixed with soggy tomato and warm mayonnaise. The bread put up some resistance. I managed to finish, if not enjoy, the sandwich. I nearly gagged, but no more than I would with any corner-shop baguette. I didn’t go blind or hallucinate or anything. It seemed that I had survived for now.

Advertisement

Then I continued to my second stop on the tour: the Olive Tree. It sounds like a cozy Italian place, right?

In fact, it was a standard kebab shop with a glistening meat tower that made me wonder how many cow's assholes were nestling in the pile in front of me.

Given what seemed like a Sophie’s Choice of food, I opted for the Olive Tree Special Burger—a beef patty with doner kebab ladled over it. Off-color tomatoes, plastic cheese, and dry lettuce topped the dish off. After my first bite I thought about asking my host if I could have a straw, such was the amount of grease running down my chin and back into the polystyrene tray.

As at PRM, the apparently lackadaisical standards of cleanliness were matched by the food. The doner meat was lukewarm and rubbery. The salad didn’t add much to the overall taste because it tasted of absolutely nothing. The burger itself was sloppy and fell to pieces pretty quickly.

Unlike at the newsstand, at the Olive Tree the food was prepared right in front of my eyes. The food was greasy, and I would have enjoyed it much more after a few beers, but it wasn't especially bad and I couldn’t see anything particularly unusual about its preparation. Nobody was sneezing over the grill or anything, even if could have done with a scrub. I didn’t collapse in cold sweats when I finished. Maybe the place had improved since its last inspection, or maybe the FSA is a bit overzealous. I tried not to think about what was lurking out of sight.

Advertisement

It was a good start for Bombay Spice, my final stop. Outside and in, it looked and smelled nice enough, like a pretty normal Indian takeaway. It had a decent seating area, leather sofas in the front, the same carpet and wallpaper all these places seem to share, and a friendly and accommodating staff. The hygiene/quality correlation hypothesis that I had developed at the other two places had taken a knock. I was feeling quite confident.

Unable to stomach a full meal at this point, I stuck with two classic starters—the mixed kebab and a chicken chat. Appearances can be deceiving, and what Bombay Spice served up was the worst food of the night. The mixed kebab came first, with an onion bhaji big enough to be used as a child’s hat. Each bite saw grease swilling around my teeth like mouthwash. The lamb kofta was tough, watery, and bland. One patron watched me eat and raised his eyebrows as he waited for his own food.

The chicken chat looked like an angry paper bag full of vomit and didn’t taste great either. The pastry had the consistency of a fried bath towel, while the chicken and potato filling was hard to figure out. A lot of sugar had been dumped in there, perhaps to mask the taste, or maybe as a failed experiment. It was awful—the first and only dish I didn’t finish. But again, I didn't feel ill and had survived what I had thought would be a culinary Russian roulette.

Returning to Lime Street I had a few moments of introspection as the poorly conceived food went to work on my insides.

I didn’t suffer from food poisoning, but the food I had eaten did me no favors. That said, I had eaten three fatty meals, so I would probably have felt that way wherever I'd gone. In fact, possibly the most concerning thing about these places was how normal they seemed. There was a vague correlation between the zero ratings and the quality of the food, in the sense that a place vying for a Michelin Star is unlikely to get a zero rating. But basically these were three slightly below-par establishments that I could have come across on any night out or rush to eat before catching a train. And that is surely food for thought.

Follow Joseph Viney and Chris Bethell on Twitter.