As the unappetizing infractions rack up, Ruby Restaurant closes for good
The latest—and likely last—development in the Ruby Restaurant brouhaha was announced in the Toronto Star this morning: the usually jam-packed Scarborough eatery is closing for good. After a roach infestation, 22 salmonella cases and two inspection failures in one week, Ruby’s owners held an emergency meeting over the weekend at which they decided to declare bankruptcy. The DineSafe page for Ruby reads like a nasty report card, with a series of S and C marks (meaning “significant” and “crucial,” respectively) in such categories as “Operator fail to ensure food is not contaminated/adulterated” and “Operator fail to prevent an insect infestation”—nausea-inducing terms that prompted us to start searching out the DineSafe pages for some local eating spots.
Without getting into specifics, we will sign off with this: the words “conditional pass” become more terrifying when read over and over, and the city’s searchable DineSafe database is a great way to kill a few hours (if not a few cockroaches).
We used to go to the Ruby regularly, over 10 years ago. They were always all smiles when we came to dine. Then, one Mother’s Day, we took the family for the special banquet and were relegated to a remote, screened off area with a few other Caucasian families. We were repeatedly told to our faces (by a host who pretended not to know us) that there was no special dinner (even though hundreds of Asian families were feasting in the main room), that the kitchen could only offer a few standard dishes. All the mothers and even the little girls in the restaurant were brandishing long-stemmed roses (which we were not offered, of course) and the whole thing was a disaster. We never returned. I put a curse on them and even though it took a decade to work, I see that what goes around, comes around!