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Restaurant owner believes health inspector mistook carpet nails for rodent droppings

State records show Pia's Trattoria was shut down as an emergency closure with 18 violations.
Pia's Trattoria was closed by health officials on Aug. 7.

GULFPORT, Fla. — No matter who was asked, everyone seemed to have great things to say about Pia’s Trattoria Italian restaurant on Beach Boulevard in the heart of downtown Gulfport.

“She’s got wonderful, wonderful food,” said longtime customer Deborah Blake.

“Everything is homemade there, so you can taste the difference,” said another customer named Kaylie Cole.

And while customers rave, health inspectors with Florida’s Division of Hotels and Restaurants had a much different rating of the restaurant following their latest inspection back on Aug. 7.

State records show Pia’s Trattoria was shut down as an emergency closure with 18 violations, including no soap or paper towels at an employee hand washing sink, temperatures on the pesto pasta found at 53 degrees and rodent activity.

State records show the inspector reporting finding rub marks along the ceiling and walls in the outdoor dining area and rodent droppings in the private dining room near the china cabinet, around the clean linens in the kitchen, near glasses at the drink station, on window sills in the dining room and right next to stored pasta in a back closet.

“Oh, that’s not a good thing,” said Blake, who was very surprised by the state’s findings.

Customer Kaylie Cole also works in the restaurant industry said while customers want to know the food their eating is going to be safe, one bad inspection is not necessarily something customers should be concerned about.

“Sometimes it just happens,” said Cole. "You can’t really help it. All you can do it try to do is prevent it and when things like this happen, react the way you should react.”

So 10News stopped in to check on conditions a week after this restaurant was cleared to reopen.

An employee who greeted us at the front door did not want to appear on camera but did call the restaurant’s owner who came down to speak with us. He also declined our request for an interview but agreed to speak with us off-camera and also briefly allowed our camera into the kitchen.

Once inside, he showed us an area where he believes the health inspector might have mistaken old carpet nails for rodent droppings.

Other areas we were allowed to inspect also appeared dropping free. And while the owner admits there’s little any restaurant can do to prevent rodents outside, he wants customers to know his kitchen is clean.

Customers like Blake seem confident too.

“I don’t what happened, but I’m sure Pia is going to fix it and it will never ever happen again.”

Pia-Maria Goff, owner of the restaurant, send 10News a statement:

Thank you for stopping by our establishment today to discuss the customer complaint and closure.

A customer filed an online complaint with the Florida Department of Hotel & Restaurant which stated that they saw a mouse on a vine at night in our outside garden seating area. Following this complaint the department sent out two inspectors to inspect our restaurant. After completing a thorough 3 hour inspection of the facility the inspectors found no evidence of current rodent activity. They did however find 16 individual old mice droppings in various locations in our outside garden, including the privacy fence, 2 old mouse droppings at the entrance to the kitchen from the outside garden and 2 old droppings in our inside dining area. Additionally, 2 nail heads that the inspectors agreed were incorrectly noted as dropping in our storage could not be corrected because the report was already filed. We just reopened from our day and night renovations which included complete building envelope sealing and the inspectors believed this was the reason for these dropping because the building was open at night. Unfortunately, we were told that the Department’s new policy is that they must force a 24hr closure if there is a complaint filed. We do everything in our power to reduce the risk of rodents in the outside garden area with traps outside and inside our property line. We will continue to follow these practices to reduce the risk of rodents entering our garden area. We are now reviewing options of changing our outside garden area to an enclosed inside seating area, thus removing the risk of future incidents.

You can view Pia’s entire inspection history here.

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