Many of Montreal’s most unhygienic eateries have stayed open despite amassing thousands of dollars in fines from health inspectors.

Marché Kim Hour, a grocery store and sandwicherie in St-Michel, was fined $20,000 over five occasions between 2010 and 2012 for not keeping food at safe temperatures. The store’s Côte-des-Neiges location was slapped with a further $3,600 in tickets for unsanitary conditions.

More recently, Patisserie Maison Mottas at the Jean-Talon market garnered $16,000 in fines in 2013 and 2014.

However, a backlog at the city’s courts means that it is unclear whether these establishments have been hit with further penalties.

When the city’s inspectors find unsafe food handling, they do not issue fines immediately. Instead, the offending restaurant goes to court for the fine to be handed down, which can take over a year after the problem is found.

Slow-moving courts are a problem all-too-familiar to Pradeep Anand, the financial controller for Eggspectation, a chain with nine breakfast restaurants in Montreal.

A rogue Eggspectation franchisee in the Old Port ran up thousands in fines from health inspections. Anand says that in 2008, the company took the owner to court to stop him from using the Eggspectation name and won.

But the restaurant stayed open and kept using the Eggspectation name, running up more fines for poor hygiene practices.

“The city had issues with him; the landlord had issues with him,” says Anand. Finally, in 2012, the issue went back to court, and the restaurant was finally shut down.

Jean Lefebvre, vice-president for Quebec governmental affairs at Restaurants Canada, thinks the system of sending fines for bad hygiene to court is a problem.

“When there’s a restaurant who got fined often, it would take zillions of months before it was settled,” he says. “Meanwhile, the restaurant stays open the whole time.”

The city’s inspectors can shut down restaurants whose food poses an immediate danger, but only for up to five days while they fix the problem.

Restaurateurs with bad hygiene can also be marked as high-risk, meaning an inspector visits every three months. But those inspectors can only issue fines, which can take months to inch through the courts while the restaurant keeps serving.

Lefebvre suggests that inspectors need more powers. “If someone makes a major mistake and doesn’t comply, they should be closed,” says Lefebvre.

Keeping up food safety standards looks to be getting tougher for Montreal’s inspectors. From 2012 to 2013, the number of fines issued went up by almost two-thirds. But the province cut Montreal’s budget for inspections by almost two per cent for 2014, as the restaurant sector keeps growing.

According to Concordia University professor Alan Nash, who studies Montreal’s restaurant scene, many new restaurateurs may not have the expertise to do the job well – or safely.

“We think we can start a restaurant, and that we all know how to cook,” said Nash. “But there’s a lot more going on in terms of economics, planning, ordering and preparing the food, pricing it, and location.”

The city will still need to meet a quota of 10,500 inspections per year despite the cuts. As the city’s 2014 food safety report is not yet available, it’s unclear whether the cuts meant that there were fewer or less-thorough inspections.

Lower funding for health inspections means that Montrealers may have to make their own calls about food safety. Local chef and restaurateur Markus Dressler says consumers can assess a restaurant’s cleanliness, even if they can’t get behind-the-scenes.

“If you see a restaurant with no turnover, it means they don’t give a damn,” says Dressler.
Cleanliness shouldn’t be assessed by the type of food a restaurant serves, says Dressler, but rather, how busy they are.

“It’s not just ethnic restaurants, it can be any Québécois diner, or whatever. You can see it in the volume of customers coming in and how much the staff are working.”

The City of Montreal did not return calls for comment before deadline. 

Below: explore a map detailing the location of Montreal restaurants fined by health inspectors since 2009.