HALIFAX – A popular waterfront restaurant has been given the all-clear to reopen Tuesday, two days after reporting staff and customers had become ill.
The owner of The Bicycle Thief posted on Twitter Saturday evening that several employees and diners had come down with “Norwalk-like symptoms.”
As an extra precaution, Stephanie and Maurizio Bertossi also temporarily closed their other nearby establishment, Ristorante a Mano.
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Both restaurants are located at Bishop’s Landing.
Nova Scotia’s Director of Agriculture and Food Protection says the restaurant has thoroughly disinfected the eatery’s food and non-food surfaces during the last 48 hours and is safe to reopen.
“Our staff had been working very closely with the owners to try and get the issues resolved at the facility and the owners have been very cooperative, very responsible,” Mike Horwich said in a phone interview.
Horwich said the virus had all the “clinical symptoms and signs of a norovirus.”
He explained the virus is everywhere in the community, but once in a while it turns up in restaurants.
“We usually get half a dozen or so (reports) a year,” he said. “There are many food-borne illnesses that occur that are not reported and people just think they’re sick from something else, but it could indeed be noro that was transmitted through food, through a common setting.”
“Anywhere people gather, the potential exists,” he added, saying norovirus often occurs in settings such as schools, nursing homes and child care facilities.
Horwich says any employees that had fallen ill will have to have gone 48 hours without symptoms, but it will be up to the owners and management to determine if they have enough staff to reopen as scheduled.
The Bicycle Thief was set to reopen Tuesday at 11:30 a.m., but the owners sent out a tweet late Monday afternoon to say the restaurant would remain closed for and extra day.
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