Craft Food House — Restaurant in Cobourg

Our workplace is a medical clinic in town, regularly ordered food for lunch from Craft food house over several years.

Unfortunately, they had a recent norovirus outbreak amongst their staff.

Public health had been involved.

They posted on their Facebook page that they were closed Sunday and Monday Jan 19/20 2025 for deep cleaning.

Despite their "closure" for "deep cleaning" - they accepted a takeout order for our entire clinic staff on the Monday AM for lunch on Monday Jan 20. They also accepted take out order on that Monday afternoon for another visitor of our clinic.

Within 24-36 hrs of eating the lunch - our entire clinic team - physicians and staff were violently ill with the norovirus infection. There was one person who also works in our clinic, but for a separate office and who didn't join in for lunch who was spared the illness experience.

Craft food house replied to our concerns by stating:

"Please accept our sincere apologies. We did not ask for this vicious cycle to hit our restaurant and the members of the community. We can absolutely sympathize with small business having to shut down. Despite our best efforts, staff who was assisting in packaging the food to be delivered (chef cooked your meals just him) had later come down with symptoms of the norovirus that day. This particular staff member is off for the week to recover. We hope everyone has been able to recover quickly and well. Again we sincerely apologize."

Unfortunately, there are several concerns that this apology DOES NOT ADDRESS:

1. You accepted takeout order and continued to process food when you were in the middle of a "deep clean" and "reportedly closed" - as posted on your public facing Facebook page.

2. You didn't care that you exposed your regular customers to a food borne illness (you didn't care that customers included very young, very old, pregnant, immunocompromised, cancer patients) who are all more at risk for complications from dehydration secondary to norovirus.

3. 2 out of 9 people in our group/visitor who were served your tainted food needed to attend the emergency department to receive urgent medical care, one of them is a pregnant woman in her second trimester.

4. Our clinic had to close down entirely - physicians had to cancel clinic - this meant 60-70 patients' MEDICAL appointments were CANCELLED, and they had delays in their medical care - had to be rebooked to 1-2 months out from their existing appointment dates in that week.

5. You saved your small business at the expense of our small business - by accepting our clinic's takeout order, and the resulting illness - our clinic was closed for several days, and there was no income for our medical clinic, so our small business had thousands in lost income, and is in the NEGATIVE by thousands having to pay for monthly expenses without any income for the rest of that week.

Our clinic will definitely, never be ordering from Craft food house again (not because we fell ill, but because you KNEW there was a problem, but still SENT OUT TAINTED FOOD in the middle of your cleaning).

If you had been honest at the time of order pick up - that we have a norovirus outbreak - we would have even given you the money to NOT give us the food, and to help out a small business. But even that option wasn't there.

Our clinic is reaching out to a lawyer to see what our legal options for damages and compensation are in...

Terrible. Reserved a table for 5. We walked in and were sat at a table for 4 with only 4 settings. Immediately noticed our water glasses were absolutely filthy so we asked the young girl for clean glasses. She had attitude about it. She brought back only 4 glasses despite 5 people and when asked for the 5th was annoyed. The next round of glasses were just as filthy and one had lip marks all around it. So disgusting. She brought the 5th glass put it on the table and left without pouring our water, fine enough. I poured my own and started drinking when I felt a sharpness on the side of my lip. My glass had a chipped rim. That was it for us. No air, bad attitude, filthy glasses and then a broken one to boot. Will never enter this premise again. Tried to get in everywhere else and they were packed and booked up. This place was empty inside, that should have...

This place was promising but has been nothing but disappointing after my first visit.

Had a pulse salad the first time I was there and loved it. Ever since I have returned nearly half a dozen times (my coworker loves the food, but is also always disappointed) and the food never seems to be as good as the first time. First time the salad was great with lots of Tuna, kale, humus, Pulses etc. Ever since, there has always been ingredients missing or substituted and the salad tastes gross. Don't substitute pomegranate for chickpeas or use parsley as a stand-in for kale!!!!!!!!

The worst experience I have had there was one time when I was waiting for my take-out and I asked the chef about the inconsistency in the quality of the food and he was quite rude.

That being said most of the other servers I have encountered have been...