08/29/2026
A Statement to Our Customers & Community
We feel it is important to address something that has recently appeared in the State Journal-Register.
An article was published under the headline “Springfield restaurants: bad health inspections, sewage, gnats, and mold are present in local restaurants,” and a photograph of myself with a health inspector at our restaurant was used with the article.
We want to make it absolutely clear: the restaurant pictured is NOT the restaurant described in that article. Those violations were not ours, have never been ours, and are not representative of our restaurant.
We allowed the State Journal-Register to visit our restaurant during an actual health inspection so they could observe firsthand how the Sangamon County Department of Public Health conducts inspections and what inspectors look for. We welcomed that opportunity because we believe in transparency and in working together with our health department to keep our employees, our customers, and our community safe.
Health codes, laws, and regulations change over time, and we believe the relationship between local restaurants and our health department should be a partnership—not an adversarial relationship. We work with our health department, ask questions, make improvements when needed, and do our best every day to maintain a clean, safe environment for the people who walk through our doors.
Our inspection records are public. Anyone who would like to see our actual inspection history can visit the Sangamon County Department of Public Health website and review our reports for themselves.
This photograph has appeared more than once alongside articles with headlines discussing serious health violations at Springfield-area restaurants. While we understand that newspapers use photographs to accompany stories, we are concerned that repeatedly using our picture with headlines like this can unintentionally leave readers with the impression that the violations being discussed occurred at our restaurant.
They did not.
We are proud of the restaurant we have built and the community we have served for many years. We take food safety, cleanliness, our employees, and our customers very seriously.
We simply want our customers and our community to have the correct information and not form an opinion of our restaurant based solely on a photograph placed next to a headline—especially when the full article may be behind a paywall.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us, trusted us, and continued to walk through our doors. We appreciate you more than you know.
Please don't judge a restaurant by a headline or a photograph. Look at the facts. ❤️
— Thank you for reading this.
Goldie and David Harris
