Brisbane City Council's 2016 food hall of shame has been revealed, with 41 restaurants across the city successfully prosecuted for food breaches last year, reaping almost $1 million in fines.
While some of the offences dated back to 2014, each of the 41 matters (listed in a searchable format below) was resolved in 2016, with fines totalling $928,700.
The single biggest fine handed out last year was issued to KFC Chermside, which copped a $45,000 penalty last August over a lack of cleanliness, issues with the hand-washing facilities and the presence of pests.
Other major restaurant fines handed out in 2016 were to Sunnybank's Jiu Wan Ban ($37,600), West End Garden ($37,500), China Kitchen Pinelands at Sunnybank Hills ($36,000) and Red Lotus Vietnamese at Annerley ($35,000).
When asked whether the council needed to engage with Asian communities when it came to food safety, Cr Quirk said he did not want to go down that route.
"We zero in on those people who are not doing the right thing and we don't want to persecute everybody at the expense of those who are doing the right thing," he said.
"The good thing, though, is that our message is starting to get through and what we've seen in the last year is a significant drop in the number of people we've had to go after.
"These cases take a while to reach fruition, but I can tell you the prosecution level is way down now, so we are getting through with our message."
While those 41 bricks-and-mortar restaurants came under heavy council scrutiny last year, Cr Quirk praised the city's fleet of about 190 food trucks, which had performed well in the council's EatSafe program.
Ninety-six per cent of those food trucks, Cr Quirk said, had received "exceptionally high" food safety standards in 2016.
"I think people generally would have expected that they would not be at the same level of health safety and star rating as perhaps a stationary premises, where it's a much more controlled environment," he said.
"But our experience is they are doing very well and people can visit them with confidence."
EatSafe, a five-star rating program, was introduced in 2010 to, as Cr Quirk said, "make sure we have confidence in our eating facilities here in Brisbane".
"We have seen in Brisbane a lifting each year of the standards," he said.
"That's what we wanted to achieve with the five-star rating, to encourage people to get a high rating.
"And the way the system is structured is if you get a five star, or a four star, we visit you far less frequently."
It was a different matter for restaurants with a zero-to-two star rating.
"We are visiting you on a very frequent basis," Cr Quirk said.
Overall, Cr Quirk said Brisbane could be happy with the performance of its 7500 food licensees.
"We've come a massive way in terms of the culinary opportunity people now have," he said.
"Our standard of chefs and the offering now has just gone leaps and bounds ahead, particularly in the last three or four years."
