Contact 13

Dirty Dining: A double dose of sushi

CREATED Jul. 4, 2012

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  • Things are a little raw out there for a couple of sushi restaurants. They tied for starring roles in this week's Dirty Dining. Video by ktnv.com

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Las Vegas, NV (KTNV) -- Things are a little raw out there for a couple of sushi restaurants. They tied for starring roles in this week's Dirty Dining.

It was a double dose of demerits for Xtreme Sushi on South Eastern. Both the kitchen and sushi bar got 40-demerit "C" grades. Forty-one would have shut them down.

When Contact 13 arrived, they'd already been reinspected and were back to all "As."

"Any and all problems that were previous are no longer.  They're all gone," said Manager Eric Olson.

He took us on a tour, which started in the open-air sushi bar where inspectors found flies on the sushi case.

"It was because the fans were actually blowing in the wrong direction, they were blowing towards," Olson explained.

Behind the sushi cases, inspectors found chefs who weren't properly certified and handling sushi rolls with their bare hands.

They also found all three hand sinks blocked by rice pot stands and other stuff, which have now been moved out of the way.

Darcy Spears: There was a lot of stuff that inspectors found at unsafe temperatures -- from mussels to crab salad to tuna, to fried shrimp to salmon skin, and that's like half your sushi bar.
Eric: To a point, yes.  They were in the process of food prep.  So yes, they were handling some items at room temperature.

They're now using time controls to make sure that doesn't happen again.

From the sushi bar, Eric took us into the kitchen.

Darcy: Inspectors found roach feces on bags of mustard.
Eric: Yes, we had left some very old bags on a bottom shelf.

Bags which were trashed right away.

Darcy: But they also said they found some roach feces on the wall behind the water heater.
Eric: Once again, this place has been scrubbed from top to bottom.

Including the drains, which went from outright yucky to very respectable.

In addition to dirty floors, inspectors found new date stickers had been put on top of old ones on food in the fridge.

Darcy: That's not good.
Eric: No.

Perhaps the biggest head-scratcher of all -- dish soap in a soy sauce bottle.

Eric: I wanted to choke somebody for doing that!

All joking aside, Xtreme Sushi wants to reassure patrons they're back up to par.

"We've stepped up where we need to be and we want to stay there, period."

The other restaurant with a 40-demerit "C" grade was Tokyo Sushi on East Sahara in Commercial Center.

The owner accepts responsibility for what happened and looks forward to being reinspected.

He didn't want to talk on camera, bud did show us around.

Inspectors found the kitchen there was greasy from top to bottom.

And knives were stored dirty, with dried-on food debris.

They looked much better when we saw them.

We made sure to check the bamboo sushi rolling mats after inspectors found a soiled employee hat stored on top of them.

Other items on the no-no list were a ladle on its last legs, a hand sink being used to prepare food, and lettuce, shrimp and eggs that had to be tossed because of unsafe temperatures.

We also learned there's a science to sushi rice and theirs wasn't up to snuff.

Inspectors told them to send it to a certified lab for PH testing.