A number of restaurant officials said they were incensed to see the names of their companies on the list, which the Department of Public Health posted on its website this week.
“Our meat supplier, Premier Meat Co., is exclusive, and they don’t buy any of the meats from that packaging company,” said Pete Levonian, the general manager of 21 Oceanfront. “It’s just false information.”
Representatives for the Premier Meat Co., who refused to give their names, also said their company did not do business with the Chino plant.
Tom Ryder, the president of Fresca’s Mexican Grill in Costa Mesa, and Tim Fussell, the manager of Hooters, said they were surprised to see their companies’ names on the state list.
“As soon as we found out about the outbreak, our director of purchasing put out a list to all the Hooters [locations] saying, ‘Hey, guys, this doesn’t affect us,’” Fussell said. “We didn’t get any of the tainted beef.”
Douglas Ayres, the founder of the Ayres Hotel, also said his restaurant had not used any of the suspect beef. He added that the state list even got his business’ name wrong, calling it the Country Inn & Suite; the hotel, formerly known as the Ayres Country Inn & Suites, changed its name recently.
“It’s a state list,” Ayres said. “How accurate is the state in anything? How well does the government run anything?”
Lea Brooks, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Health, acknowledged Thursday morning that the list is probably not definitive.
Her office, she said, compiled the information by identifying meat distributors believed to have received the Chino beef and asking for their customer lists from the last two years.
The information, Brooks said, would likely change more than once.
“This list can go seven, eight layers deep,” she said. “So going through this process could take days or even weeks.”
