

Castro residents should be plenty familiar with this tale by now: A restaurant gets temporarily shut down by inspectors with the city's health department, maybe more than once, due to vermin infestations and poor hygiene all around, only to reopen shortly thereafter with a completely different name but basically the same menu and staff. It happened with Barracuda on Market Street which closed and reopened twice under two different names, Mandu and Janchi before finally closing for good last year. It happened a few doors down at Bombay Indian Restaurant (2217 Market) which closed last year and is now reopened as Tara Indian Cuisine. And it happened on that same block with SliderBar, which briefly tried rebranding itself last fall as Ovok. Now NBC Bay Area has done a full investigative report on why this happens, and it has to do with a loophole in the law around getting your health department inspection history expunged.

As reporter Bigad Shaban explains in the report you can watch in full below, a state law allows for health department records for a given address to disappear when a new business moves in, even if the ownership remains the same.

The restaurant formerly known as All Season Restaurant in Diamond Heights, whose owners changed the name to Harbor Villa but are still too cheap to take down the old sign, has been shut down SEVEN TIMES by the city's Department of Environmental Health, and it's been allowed to reopen under re-inspection each time. But if you look up Harbor Villa in the city's public database, you'll only see inspections going back through 2015 and no shutdowns, because Harbor Villa technically only opened in February 2015.

In total, there are 38 restaurants citywide that have had their operating licenses suspended for health violations two or more times.

NBC Bay Area took their findings to Supervisor Jane Kim who said, "It’s clearly a loophole that some of our businesses have discovered and are utilizing to basically pay a couple hundred dollars and basically wipe away their health violations." She has pledged to try to close the loophole.

Now it's perhaps a matter of time before Harbor Villa is forced to shut down, because that news report is already impacting its Yelp score.

Related: The Castro Is Teeming With Vermin

Yelp Now Explicitly Warning You Off Restaurants With Poor Health Scores