Musie Wailn runs a tight ship. As Franchise Chef of the Burrito Shack, he has to.

“Every employee says this is the cleanest kitchen they worked,” he says. “I keep things organized.” 

The Ottawa franchise opened two restaurants over the last year, first on Sunnyside Avenue and Seneca Street in the summer of 2014. The second location opened on Bank Street and Second Avenue at the beginning of 2015.

Even with Wailn’s confidence, both restaurants failed their initial health inspections.

Combined, the two Burrito Shack locations failed 10 portions of the inspection. This accounted for 15 per cent of the failures from all Mexican restaurants in Ottawa in 2014 and 2015.

Toni-Marie D’Ettorre, a Supervisor with Ottawa Public Heath, says that the inspections focus on sanitation, maintenance, food handling, storage and preparation.

“They take temperatures of food products. They take those temperatures and if they’re not at the right temperature they get written up,” says D’Ettore, “That’s one of the things we take very seriously.”

The portion is code FCD, failing to keep food held at 4°C (40°F) or less, a part both locations failed during initial inspection, which is considered a critical deficiency. In total, there were 625 failures of code FCD in 2014 and 2015, accounting for 7.5 per cent of all failures throughout the period.

Both Burrito Shack location’s passed their recent 2015 health inspections; Nov. 6 for the Bank location and Nov. 15 for the Sunnyside location, including the previous FCD failure.

“You don’t want to clean things up the day of the health inspection. You want to keep it going to get it in your employees head,” says Wailn.

Still, there were portions of the inspection Burrito Shack received warnings for that felt unfair to Wailn. On the latest inspection, he says there was disconnect between what previous health inspectors told him, including guidelines for employees washing hands, which can be considered critical.

A previous inspector told Wailn that as long as they wore gloves, employees would not need to wash their hands after making each burrito, whereas the most recent inspector said they had to wash.

“Our employees wear gloves. If you wear gloves and your hands are wet, good luck getting those gloves in, they’ll never go inside, “ says Wailn. “All of them are different, so it’s hard to know what to expect sometimes…the main thing they wanted is for our employees to wear hats moving forward.”

But according to D’Ettorre, the test is a constant and it’s the restaurant managers that are all different.

“It all depends on who owns that establishment and the management that establishment has, because in general there is a policy that everyone is supposed to adhere to” says D’Ettorre. “That’ll largely decide the outcome of the inspection.”

As far as experience, Wailn claims to have never gone to any Mexican restaurant besides his own. Even though Wailn previously worked as a manager at Ottawa pizza chain Milano’s, it didn’t prepare him for these inspections.

“There was definitely a learning curve we had to adjust to,” says Wailn, “Milano’s Pizza was all frozen food, whereas everything here is freshly cooked. Now I think we have it down pat.”

Yet Wailn suggests there may be factors outside of management’s control.

“The worst thing for a health inspector to do, is come in at a Thursday or Friday during lunch rush and expect everything to be neat,” says Wailn.

“If you want to come in at 9 a.m. or after the lunch rush, you’ll give us some time to clean things up. I think they made that mistake when they came into our Sunnyside location, they came at a lunch rush.”