Today Sun Mon
It is forcast to be Chance of Snow at 10:00 PM EST on February 11, 2012
Chance of Snow
-4°/-8°		 It is forcast to be Chance of Snow at 10:00 PM EST on February 12, 2012
Chance of Snow
0°/-4°		 It is forcast to be Clear at 10:00 PM EST on February 13, 2012
Clear
3°/-2°

26 Comments

news

Happy No More

By Jonathan Goldsbie

2008_11_20SadSeven.jpg
A week after we took CityNews to task for their bottom-feeding coverage of a handful of rats in the window of Happy Seven, they once again led their 6 p.m. newscast with a piece on vermin in Chinatown. (Supposedly another restaurant was forced to close.) Citytv has also, we’re told, been running incessant promos for its flagship news program with Mark Dailey‘s booming voice bragging “We got them shut down!” over images clearly identifying Happy Seven.
Not one to pass up an opportunity to build a career on rodents and racism, Andrea Piunno is this week presenting a series on restaurant cleanliness that helpfully informs us it’s not just the Chinese who are filthy; it’s Koreans, too! Of course, the series includes a generous helping of the same Happy Seven footage, edited in with Eisensteinian precision. (And the forehead-slapping music in the final segment, praising Little Italy, seems to have been chosen in order to underline the area as ethnic.)
It now seems that all of Citytv’s hard work has paid off, Happy Seven having finally gone out of business this past Wednesday, following a sharp drop-off in customers (including the key post-last call crowd) in the last few weeks. The tables are still set and the sandwich boards remain outside, implying the closure happened rather quickly.
Of course we’re not doubting that pests in a food establishment warrant a temporary shutdown, or that the DineSafe program is worthy of criticism. Rather, to reiterate the thesis of our earlier post, rats in the window of a restaurant are not news, and catching them on video is certainly not something that a self-respecting news organization should refer back to again and again and again and again as one of its proudest accomplishments.
Perhaps most selfishly, though, we are (seriously) quite sad that we will never get to try Happy Seven’s “rich” honey-roasted pigeon.
Photo by Jonathan Goldsbie.

Filed under: , , , , , , , , ,

Report error Send a tip

Comments

  • rek

    Nooo, Ka Chi!? Is nothing sacred?

  • David Toronto

    I believe this is the time for BBM ratings and that would explain the news sensationalism at CITY.

  • Jonathan Goldsbie

    I imagine “Ka Chi” means something in Korean, but for the record, the restaurant Ka Chi — directly around the corner from Happy Seven — remains open.

  • rek

    I know, but it got a yellow card in January for not having enough bug-killers.
    Ka chi means magpie, as I recall.

  • rek

    Wait, sorry, I was talking about the Ka Chi at Bloor and Palmerston, not the one in Kensington Market.

  • metabaron

    What is this about? Nothing sacred… well hopefully other restaurants learn something from this example. Not sure what you are referring to as sacred, but if you do want to frequent filthy and rat/roach infested places, noone is stopping you. Clearly in this case the customers have voted not to support this establishment.
    Also, we need some program we can trust. Can’t trust DineSafe, can’t trust Toronto Life, Now, torontoist (obviously!) and so on. Do I have to go to a restaurant myself and then visit the kitchen and watch them how they prepare the food?

  • user8909

    yes metabaron, for a gullible paranoiac, it is the only solution.

  • rek

    I eat at Ka Chi at least once a week.

  • joeclark

    No, J-Gold, rats in a restaurant window are news.

  • j0hnnyb

    “…rats in the window of a restaurant are not news…”
    I’m so glad I don’t rely on this blog for my news.

  • ArnoldDarkshner

    What kind of stupid is this article? There were rats in the restaurant right?

  • lunarworks

    People stopped going to a restaurant because it had rats running free in it, causing the restaurant to lose money and shut down.
    How is this an outrage? Hell, I’d like to know if my favorite restaurant had a rat problem.

  • RealityCheck

    It’s because the new line at Torontoist and BlogTO is that food safety concerns are RACIST!!! Rats are really harmless creatures and it is only our false consciousness instilled by the white imperialist heteronormative speciesist patriarchy that creates this paranoia about so-called “vermin”.
    Problems in Kensington? It’s a conspiracy by the establishment against the avant-garde cheese mongers that reject your notions of refrigeration. Problems in ethnic restaurants? Mentioning it is racist.
    Ignore the fact that the country went to town this summer against the blindingly white McCain owned Maple Leaf Foods for killing people with tainted meat. Stories about food safety are inherently paranoid and racist because Goldsbie says they are.
    Also ignore the fact that vermin represent not only a small scale danger like lysteria, workers with hepatitis or mumps, or E. coli, but also represent an existential threat. Rats have acted as disease vectors for thousands of years and came rather close to wiping out Western Europe with the Bubonic Plague. I’m sure that mentioning the chance of a pandemic is also racist, since current practices in China are the greatest risk for one. Bad practices are only bad when employed by white people Goldsbie can sneer at, when they’re adopted by others they must be respected as cultural practices regradless of any existential threat they may pose.

  • Jonathan Goldsbie

    Joe: I should probably clarify. It’s not so much that it’s not news as that it’s not news of the calibre that Citytv seems to think it is.
    From my previous post:
    “Certainly the Happy Seven incident has received way too much coverage. Or, more accurately, coverage that is far too prominent in their respective news outlets. It was the top story on the CityNews website for a day and a half. It led off their 6 p.m. newscast Wednesday and likely several ones subsequent to that. CBC Toronto had it as the top story on their site. The Star’s site gave it second billing, behind the report on the cost of the war in Afghanistan.
    [...]
    “The thing is, at Dumpling House, the rats were on the proudly-displayed food preparation surface. Here, they were just in the window, next to a PASS sign. Which is not to say it wasn’t a problem, but it was more of a cute/funny thing than a scary one. Like the top pic. That is: it wasn’t (and still isn’t) news. Maybe a paragraph in the context of a whole newspaper. But not the lead story on a telecast.”

  • Jonathan Goldsbie

    rek: In the context of your original comment, I had misinterpreted “Ka Chi” to be a Korean-language exclamation.
    lunarworks: Part of the issue to me is that the restaurant addressed the problem — disinfected the premises, had pest-control people deal with the situation, and even, I think, did some minor renovation work — to the satisfaction of Public Health, and yet CityNews would not let it go.

  • wardnikoff

    Happy Seven was a great place to go drink after hours….and eat what apparently was rat infested food. Oh boy.
    I know its kensington/chinatown and all but it is possible to keep the rats out of the eating establishments…

  • torontothegreat

    Sometimes it makes you wonder if J Goldsbie is centering his career on the nutsack of D.Topping.
    I mean what kind of editor allows these sorts of ‘conspiracy with no proof’ articles to be published?

  • rek

    A blog editor.
    facepalm.jpg
    facepalm.jpg
    facepalm.jpg
    facepalm.jpg
    facepalm.jpg

  • torontothegreat

    are you saying blog editors have less sense? It just seems like open-season on Torontoist for each and every conspiracy/white-middle class guilt/pet project of Mr. Goldsbie.
    The medium isn’t the question. The message is. Even a ‘blog’ editor should be fully aware of that.
    The ‘blog’ is about toronto and things that happen in it.
    Things that ‘pretend’ happen in Toronto, doesn’t really fall into that now does it?

  • quest

    @rek
    It’s certainly not blogTO’s “new line” that “food safety issues are racist”.
    Some readers have suggested that our posts about Chinatown’s problems are race-inspired, but I’ve personally made it clear that I dont’t share that opinion. We all have our own voices at blogTO, and we avoid the collective “we” for this very reason.
    In my opinion:
    If Little Italy/Koreatown/Liberty Village/Yorkville had a string of Dinesafe closures due to rodents, blogTO would respond in the exact same way.
    There is nothing racist about this.
    The area of town has a rat problem. The fact that it’s ____town does not mean that ____ people are ____ or ____ or whatever.
    If you think it’s racist to make recommendations for safe eating in an area of town that clearly has a hygiene problem, you must be making some kind of stereotyping leaps yourselves!
    Cheers,
    Jerrold (Editor, blogTO)

  • Gauldar

    When do they redo their food safety checks anyways? Do they just do a once around and hand out the green pass cards and never go back again? I don’t know about you but that seems like it’ll just give more incentive to be careless about how the restaurant is run. But then again, it wouldn’t be the first time rodents have been used for revenge. A friend of mine evicted a negligent tenant that was renting her basement apartment, and was nice enough to introduce a couple four-legged friends on his move out of there.

  • rek

    Jerrold – What are you talking about? I didn’t say anything about racism. I’m pointing out, again, that this is a blog and not The Economist or what have you, the ‘editor’ can ‘allow’ all sorts of things that wouldn’t be published elsewhere. Including “‘conspiracy with no proof’ articles”.

  • quest

    @rek
    Sorry, my comment was meant for RealityCheck, not you.

  • torontothegreat

    a blog that wishes it was a news publication and a news publication that hides behind being a blog when it’s convenient.
    right, my bad. Sorry Rek.
    Torontoist: Toronto News, Culture, Events, Photos, and Everything Else
    Interesting how ‘news’ is first in the title, meaning this ‘blog’ would like the SEO to be ‘news oriented’ and come up when searching for ‘Toronto+News’
    But yea, I guess everything just falls into ‘everything else’ when editor’s make stupid (non) decisions. maybe someone should let the developer(s) know so they can re-jig the importance of their SEO rankings.

  • torontothegreat
  • RealityCheck

    @ Torontothegreat
    Sorry Jerrold, I was overwhelmed by the number of commenters on BlogTO making the racism argument that I forgot you had made the contrary case. Then with Goldsbie making it, I conflated the two editorial positions. Instead Torontoist and the readers at BlogTO believe it is racist to take note of food safety issues. BlogTO sees that it is a real problem, as it should.