Restaurants recover from romaine lettuce scare

Brian Certo knew what to do at the first notice of the widespread romaine recall due to an E. coli outbreak during Thanksgiving week.

The recall, the second one this year, was a “novelty problem” in April, said Certo, owner of a set of salad-centric restaurants called Eden’s Fresh Co. Now they’ve gotten “kind of good at it.”

“You never like seeing a news alert on your phone that starts with romaine,” Certo said.

The greens were thrown out, a special alternative — iceberg lettuce — was brought in, and signs explaining the change went up at his five locations in Central Florida.

Even with the substitutes, Certo worried customers would be unhappy. Certo, who has been in the restaurant business for 11 years, said sometimes restaurant owners build up these crises into bigger deals than others perceive.

“You get stressed about not being able to deliver a product people expect,” Certo said. “But you find [diners are] more flexible.”

As the produce industry rebounds, Central Florida salad restaurants and grocers themselves are getting back to normal after the year’s second E. coli connected to romaine lettuce.

The particular strand of E. coli, a bacteria, eventually led to 43 people being infected from 12 states but no reported deaths. Symptoms include stomach cramps, diarrhea, and vomiting.

On the day of the recall, Nov. 20, no known common grower, supplier, distributor, or brand of the problem romaine lettuce could be identified, leading the CDC to recommend the vegetable not be sold or ingested anywhere in the country. That order was scaled back once investigators determined the tainted lettuce came from an area of California.

The outbreaks brought immediate high demand for iceberg lettuce.

Alex Gharibyan, manager for Greenbeat, found that iceberg lettuce prices doubled — affecting the salad restaurant’s food costs.

It took some time for the restaurant to get romaine back on its shelves. It can be difficult to ascertain from suppliers where the greens originate, Gharibyan said.

For Tim Mathias, the recent overall recall was a sign that the system works. Mathias, a store director for Lucky’s Market grocery store, said the company had romaine products pulled within minutes following a notification about the recall.

“I was kind of shocked to see how much salad has romaine in it,” Mathias said.

Food recalls are monitored from the chain’s main offices and stores are individually notified. Even after the CDC narrowed the scope of its recall to certain areas in California, certain shelves at Lucky’s Market stayed bare until