Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo were courted on diplomatic working visits at Mar-a-Lago, and now one must hope they did not return home with food poisoning. The high-profile club was cited for failing to store seafood and meat at adequate temperatures and forgetting to ensure that seafood was not contaminated by parasites, the Miami Herald reported.
Many of the regulatory hiccups discovered on a January 26 inspection were classified as “high” or “intermediate” priority. In sum, 11 violations were discovered January 26, according to Florida regulatory data; the Miami Herald reports that a total of 15 violations were found in January.
What’s more, “over the last three years, records show the club has been cited 78 times for violations that included chefs handling food without washing their hands, dirty cutting boards, a slicer ‘soiled with old food debris’ and an ‘accumulation of black/green mold-like substance’ in the ice machine,” the Herald notes.
According to the observations indicated by the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, one of these high priority violations included that the “all potentially hazardous” foods stored in the reach-in cooler were not in a sufficiently cold environment. "Corrective action" was taken as the chef transferred the items into the walk-in cooler. Unfortunately, the very next violation listed is that all foods in the walk-in refrigerator were not cold enough, either.
According to a February Vanity Fair article, Trump initially submitted a $25 million bid for the Mar-a-Lago property after it was put on the market in 1981. Upon being rejected, Trump made waves by saying that he would buy a piece of land between Mar-a-Lago and the ocean that would distort the views of whoever ended up owning Mar-a-Lago. Sure enough, interest in the property waned and Trump scooped up the property for a mere $8 million in 1985.
