Xinstar Pty Ltd, owner of Oriental Garden Chinese Restaurant in Murray Bridge, fined $14,000 for food safety breaches

Hope you’ve got a strong stomach ... what health inspectors discovered in the kitchen of a popular four-decade-old Chinese restaurant would put anyone off their food.

It calls itself “the best restaurant in Murray Bridge since 1983”, proudly proclaiming its “fully family owned” status as the rural city’s “most-awarded restaurant”.

Beyond the sight of diners, however, the Oriental Garden Chinese Restaurant processed raw red meat on its floor, surrounded by dirt and grease-caked walls.

Strewn around its uncleaned dishwasher and rusting microwave lay dozens of dead cockroaches who had, in life, poured through a hole in the wall – one sealed with a strip of electrical tape.

On Wednesday, the Adelaide Magistrates Court ordered the restaurant’s owner, Xinstar International Pty Ltd, pay a $14,400 fine for its unsanitary conduct.

In sentencing, Magistrate Karim Soetratma said the local council’s health inspector had tried to help the company improve, only to experience its filth first-hand.

Murray Bridge's Oriental Garden Chinese Restaurant. Picture: Supplied

Murray Bridge's Oriental Garden Chinese Restaurant.

“When the inspector went to wash his hands in the basin, he found 40 to 50 dead cockroaches visibly stuck to the tape that was peeling away from the gap in the wall,” he said.

“The state’s food standards code is a minimum requirement for owners … if they cannot meet this standard, they should not be in the food business.”

Xinstar pleaded guilty to 10 counts of breaching the food standards code during inspections on April 14 and June 14 this year.

Online company records list Xinstar’s director as Jiaqun Lu of Sheidow Park.

A sign on the door of the Oriental Garden Chinese Restaurant.

In sentencing, Mr Soetratma said the first inspection found the kitchen walls to be filthy and its microwave – which had rusted – covered with grease and dirty.

He said an inspector also discovered the cockroach hole, the dead insects and “piles of raw red meat” on the kitchen floor alongside a food processor.

“When asked why, staff said they were busy, the processor was too heavy to lift onto the bench and there was not enough room on the bench,” he said.

During his second visit, the inspector found the kitchen remained filthy, a bag of spoiled onions was on the floor and “still more cockroaches”.

Mr Soetratma accepted Xinstar’s director, who is now selling the restaurant, was in poor health during the first part of 2022 but said that could not excuse the offending.

He said council inspectors had “been attempting since 2018” to help Xinstar bring the restaurant up to code, without success.

“In a country that likes to think of itself as a first-world country, the public is justifiably entitled to expect food prepared for human consumption to be prepared in sanitary conditions,” he said.

“These offences are serious … multiple different aspects of the restaurant presented multiple points at which hazards to human health could emerge.”