Owner says the Greece restaurant will reopen on Tuesday.

Health officials say restaurant passed its latest inspection with flying colors.

Volume of Thanksgiving Day diners made it difficult to keep foods at safe temperatures, official says.

As the restaurant where more than 260 people were sickened on Thanksgiving Day prepares to reopen, health officials have concluded that gravy was the likely source of the bacteria that made diners ill.

The gravy on the buffet line at Golden Ponds Restaurant and Party House that day apparently was served at an unacceptably low temperature that allowed a notorious food-poisoning bacteria to flourish, said John Ricci, a spokesman for the Monroe County Department of Public Health.

Restaurant owner Ralph Rinaudo, who agreed that underheated gravy was the probable cause, said he plans to reopen Tuesday. The kitchen has been upgraded and thoroughly cleaned and his staff re-instructed in proper food-handling practices, he said.

Laboratory tests isolated the bacteria Clostridium perfringens in the gravy and in the stool samples of several patrons. For technical reasons, C. perfringens is listed as the suspected but not confirmed source of the illness, though Ricci said officials are sure it is the culprit.

The underlying cause of the largest outbreak of foodborne illness in recent local history, however, may well have been the number of holiday diners — 800 to 1,100 of them — who flocked to the Long Pond Road establishment on Nov. 24.

"It’s pretty clear that the result of the sheer volume of food they served that day was that it was probably very difficult, if not impossible, to keep everything at (safe) temperature," Ricci said. "We stated to them that trying to serve that many people is just imprudent, to say the least."

Four people were hospitalized with gastrointestinal symptoms, though they and all other patrons have recovered, Ricci said.

A similar outbreak of C. perfringens at a Thanksgiving Day dinner in California left three people dead.

The Greece restaurant was inspected the day after the outbreak and its food-service permit suspended by the health department. That inspection found broken or substandard kitchen equipment, cleanliness shortcomings and examples of poor food handling.

Ricci said Golden Ponds has been reinspected recently, however, and came through with flying colors.

"There was a huge turnaround in what we saw. We were very, very pleased with the work that they’ve done there, which led lead to the recommendation from our staff to the health commissioner that their permit be reinstated," he said.

That reinstatement could come as early as Wednesday afternoon.

"We really remodeled a lot of different things and fixed everything that had to be fixed. We went through the kitchen from top to bottom," Rinaudo said.

The origin of the bacteria that made patrons ill is not known, Ricci said. C. perfringens lives in the intestinal tracts of humans and many other animals, but also in soil and on vegetation. Ricci said there is no evidence that a kitchen worker accidentally introduced the bacteria into the food supply on Thanksgiving Day.

C. perfringens is one of the most common causes of foodborne illness in the United States, sickening an estimated 1 million people a year.

Experts at the county health department, as well as the state Department of Health, had suspected C. perfringens because it fit the symptoms — rapid onset, relatively fast recovery, and severe diarrhea but no vomiting. It took several weeks to culture samples from patients and food to verify its presence.

C. perfringens in raw food can be killed by chilling or cooking. But some of the bacteria quickly form spores, or hardened coatings, that protect them from the heat. When the cooked food cools or the chilled food warms, the spores germinate into active bacteria.

For this reason, C. perfringens and other pathogens like it are the bane of buffet lines, cafeterias and pot-luck parties — places where prepared food is left to sit for extended periods of time.

Bacteria can proliferate in heated food like turkey or gravy that cools below 140 degrees and stays that way for two hours, or sometimes less. The same is true for chilled food like deviled eggs or cocktail shrimp that warms above 40 degrees, Ricci said.

"At right temperature, it (bacteria) can just explode in literally minutes of time, in such a way that it can make a lot of people sick really quickly," Ricci said.

Gravy is a preferred growth medium for C. perfringens, it turns out, and the conditions at Golden Ponds on Thanksgiving Day were ideal.

Kitchen staff prepared their gravy in a single huge kettle. It's always been done that way, Rinaudo said, and had never caused a problem before.

This Thanksgiving, however, the supposition is that bacteria found their way into the kettle and the gravy never heated through properly, allowing the pathogens to survive and perhaps thrive.

"The stuff on the top is not as hot as the stuff on the bottom," Rinaudo said by way of explanation. "We didn't know that. Now we know to make smaller batches."

Ricci said sanitary rules require kitchen staff to periodically test the temperature of food such as gravy and enter the numbers into a log; it's a way to force them to consider whether if their product is being held at safe temperatures. That was not done with the gravy at Golden Ponds, however, he said.

It's thought that the under-heated gravy from the top of the kettle was ladled into serving dishes and put out for patrons, where it cooled further.

"If you have a trained staff working in the kitchen who are informed about the importance of maintaining temperature, then it shouldn’t happen," Ricci said. "I suspect that kitchen was just a beehive of activity where attention to detail can slip."

Ricci said the Golden Ponds staff has been informed of their apparent errors. "We are very definitely going to insist that some of their food safety practices are better adhered to," he said.

The restaurant also will undergo extra inspections, he said.

There's a broader value in determining just how the Golden Ponds outbreak occurred, Ricci said.

"The other 3,000 restaurants in town are probably paying very close attention to what went wrong here," he said. "It's a learning opportunity for all of the food service establishments in our community where, if something is allowed to slip, a great many people can become ill."

SORR@Gannett.com

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