A RESTAURANT owner is “confident” his venue will be given an improved hygiene rating after it received a score of one in a recent inspection.

Marrocco’s on Hove seafront was told to make “major improvements”, following a visit by the Food Standards Agency on September 27.

Owner Peter Marrocco says lockdown meant the restaurant’s hygiene logs had not been kept up to date, and a fault with the fridge system had led to the low score.

The Argus: Marrocco's in Hove Marrocco's in Hove

 

But Peter has now paid for inspectors to revisit the restaurant after “immediately” making the recommended changes.

He said: “During lockdown the restaurant was closed and we hadn’t been logging the checks, so on the reopening we hadn’t got back into the usual routine.

“As a result, when the inspection was done, they were not up to date.

“We had another issue with our fridges in that they were giving a false reading on the exterior so while they were showing four degrees on the inside, it was actually higher.

“We weren’t aware of this because we were going off the fridge reading, which we believed to be accurate.

“Straight away we ordered £2,500 worth of new fridge equipment and they have all been installed and are running correctly.”

The family-run Italian restaurant, which was founded 50 years ago by Peter’s father Renato Marrocco, received a score of three in a previous inspection carried out by Brighton and Hove City Council in 2019.

Earlier this year it was awarded a TripAdvisor Travellers Choice Award in recognition for its consistently high reviews.

Peter said he is “confident” his restaurant will be given a score of five when inspectors return.

He said: “We’re still up to our usual standards. Out of our proud, 52-year history we have always had high rankings and we are confident that we will get to that again.

“It was nothing to do with cleanliness and we want customers to be assured that they can trust us.

“We have consistently excellent TripAdvisor and Google reviews and we are very proud of that.”

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