Gold Coast restaurants: Dead rat corpse found in Broadbeach eatery Jo’s Brasserie.
A dead rat was found painted over rather than cleaned up inside a Gold Coast restaurant famous for its family food and cheap prices. WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES
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IT was once one of the Gold Coast’s best-loved family eateries.
Jo’s Oasis Brasserie and Bar was a mainstay of the Gold Coast dining scene for more than 15 years.
Shoppers, locals and tourists all travelled to the Oasis Shopping Centre at Broadbeach to sample its inexpensive meals.
But it is also remembered for a scandal that brought down its curtains in the mid-2000s.
The restaurant’s origins date back 35 years this month to 1987 when developers announced plans to demolish the Lennons Hotel at Broadbeach and build a modern shopping centre.
The hotel was built in 1956 and had been the area’s first tower, but was considered small and out-of-date by the time of its closure.
Conrad Jupiters Casino had opened and an array of new hotel and residential towers were being built across Main Beach and Surfers Paradise.
The Oasis was pitched in April 1987 as Australia’s only “shopping resort’’, directly targeting the booming tourist market.
Its original configuration was to have 192 speciality shops, a four-bar tavern and 302-room hotel.
The centrepiece was Skylink, an elevated monorail connection with the casino, as well as a giant pedestrian mall on the former location of Victoria Ave.
The complex opened in 1989. One of its original operators was BB’s Brasserie on the second level. It was run initially by former Expo-88 chef Mark Dunn.
“For the flocking foodies, BB’s is becoming blooming beautiful. Check it out,” read a review published in October 1989.
By mid-1991 it was rebranded Oasis Brasserie and Bar and in 1994 the name Jo’s was added to its letterhead.
A review published in the Gold Coast Sun in the early 2000s gives it strong marks for its affordable cuisine.
“(It’s) real food and realistic prices,” the review read.
“It’s somewhere you can feed a family of four, with drinks, for less than $40.
“Or you can splash out a bit and have one of the biggest steaks in town, still for under $20, or a massive seafood platter for two for just $29.”
Two years later, however, after a change of ownership, the eatery would find lasting infamy.
In 2004 the Gold Coast City Council prosecuted the restaurant’s owners, Appetites International and its manager over breaches of the Food Standards Code.
Council health inspectors raided Jo’s in August 2004 and photographed a rat, “covered in thick red paint to match the floor under the main food servery”.
“A massive fungus growth crawling with cockroaches was found nearby under the servery, along with heavily rusted stoves and food preparation areas,” it was alleged.
“Other rodents, both living and dead, were spotted by inspectors and rat faeces was littered across the kitchen.”
Staff and customers had complained they had been served unfinished meals that had been scooped out of rubbish bins.
“Another customer cut into a meal of fish, only to find the animal had not been gutted and cleaned,” the court heard.
“So horrified were they by the discovery, they took the plate home and froze it as evidence.”
Council inspectors closed Jo’s and ordered a clean-up.
Magistrate Ron Kilner said at the time the state of the premises was “exposed by the disgusting photographs’’ tendered as evidence.
“It doesn’t take an expert to see that the place is in a fairly unhygienic state,’’ he said.
Jo’s closed in the mid-2000s following the court case.
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