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Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

First came an offer to buy out the lease from the restaurant. Once the restaurant dismissed that, the hotel's strategy changed: Starve 'em out. They cut off its room service business, then started renovations on the building during the summer (tourist season), obscuring the restaurant from public view. When that failed to drive the restaurant out, mysterious complaints to the Department of Health started coming on a weekly basis; the restaurant was shut down by the DOH no fewer than three times.

OP should have outed the hotel, and given names and, if available, addresses of its owners and management. That shit may be technically legal, but it shouldn't fucking be safe.

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I mean, if DoH actually shut down the restaurant, presumably the restaurant was in fact in violation of various (at least three!) health code regulations.

The DOH might shut down restaurants, per-emptively based on reports, before actually investigating.

Where? Source?

I've been in the restaurant business for 30 years and have never seen or heard of that.

ironically, in my attempt to find a better published source, i was led to my own comment.

Having spent over a decade working as a cook in various restaurants, I can assure you that at any given time, most restaurants are in violation of far more than three health code regulations. And the cliche is true, the more expensive the restaurant, the nastier the kitchen.

When this is the case, sympathy for a shut down restaurant is gone. I don't particularly care about conspiracy to shut down a restaurant serving dirty food, regardless of the intentions of the conspirators.

Violating regulations does not necessarily equate to "dirty food". For example, in SF it's OK for a coffee shop to sell ice cream in cups, but a health code violation to do so in cones.

http://blog.sfgate.com/cityinsider/2011/05/26/big-government...

Also: http://www.grubstreet.com/2014/03/per-se-health-department-i...

jpatokal already addressed this with a specific case, but you are presuming that all health code regulations are logical and actually deal with threats to patron health.