Fenway Park Failed Food Inspections on Opening Day

By KC Downey in Featured, Red Sox ⋅ June 12, 2008 at 4:59pm ⋅ Post a comment

Just think back to the last time you visited Fenway Park. It may have been this year, it may have been last year. Many of you may have purchased a small pizza, a sausage, beer, or even a Fenway frank. Did you ever start to consider that the Fenway food services could be failing city health inspections but still continuing to sell food?

Well, that’s exactly what happened to you if you visited games between Opening Day on April 8 and May 16, when Fenway Park concession stands finally passed health inspections. By Opening Day at Fenway, city inspectors found 20 violations according to the Boston Globe, including three public health threats: poor food refrigeration, insufficient hot or cold water, and unclean food surfaces.

Red Sox officials claimed the team was not informed of the violations by its vendor, Aramark, and didn’t learn of the violations until asked about it by the Globe on Wednesday.

“We have made it clear to Aramark that we want to be informed immediately when any issues related to the Division of Health occur from this point going forward,” Red Sox chief operating officer Mike Dee said in an interview.

Oops. Aramark’s response to the city’s findings was so slow that the city threatened at a municipal court hearing to shut down Fenway Park’s food stands if the problems were not fixed. In the end, 19 home games went by before the first clean inspection.

In the first visit before Opening Day on April 1, Globe reporter John C. Drake describes what inspectors saw:

In the initial visit, on April 1, inspectors found sausages thawing in stagnant water, employees handling raw burgers without changing their gloves, and rodent droppings underneath service counters, city records show.

You don’t have to be an expert to know that that’s absolutely disgusting and vile. I am going to think twice before I ever purchase food at Fenway again. I’m serious. The only thing I may ever buy are those irresistible frozen Minute Maid Lemonades…they are out of this world.