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Guest commentary: A pledge to keep Firefly customers safer than ever

I have been cooking in restaurants since I was 15 years old. I created Firefly Tapas Kitchen & Bar 10 years ago. Firefly, my labor of love, has come a long way since the early days, when every night I was the only guy working the line in the kitchen, sleeping on the couch in the office so I could wake up and get a jump on the prep for the next day’s service.

Thanks to the hard work of a lot of great Firefly employees and the support of a lot of great Firefly fans, our little restaurant grew more and more popular. Our customers created more customers. We were a “crowd-sourced” restaurant. We grew by word of mouth. Because we were good. Because we did things right. And because we did everything with love.

The early days, when I had to sell my house and max out my credit cards to pay the bills at the restaurant, have faded but will never be forgotten. I still think of Firefly as the underdog, battling the large chains and long odds against under-funded restaurants making it.

When I got the call

When I got the call that the Southern Nevada Health District had stormed the restaurant and shut us down in the middle of a packed dinner service, my heart stopped. They said they had multiple complaints of food poisoning symptoms from people who had eaten at Firefly.

Virtually all restaurants, especially places as busy as Firefly on Paradise Road, get occasional calls from diners reporting food-borne illness symptoms. We take such reports very seriously and document them in case we get other similar calls. I’ve been cooking professionally for 30 years and had never gotten that corroborating second similar call — ever.

Time stopped.

Then the questions came. What is the extent of this? Did anyone get hurt? What happened? Is this really happening? Oh my God, I hope everyone is OK.

What happened?

This became the persistent question that everyone was asking me and that I kept asking myself. I met my managers Monday morning at our empty Firefly on Paradise. Little did I know that by day’s end I would be interviewed by virtually every TV station and newspaper in town. In the midst of this whirlwind of attention, we were working with the health district, providing them with the information they needed to get to the bottom of this situation and also taking calls and information from people who had gotten sick.

But in my head, the question echoed over and over, louder and louder. What happened?

With what I know now, I have to be brutally honest with myself. We contributed to this problem. We didn’t do enough, no matter if we had an “A” hanging on the door or not.

A new approach

We have always taken food safety very seriously at Firefly restaurants. The Paradise location has had all A’s posted for the past three years, except for one time when a pipe burst out back of the restaurant and we had to shut down.

I’ve had lots of time to think about what happened, why it happened, and how to change our operations to do everything in our power to make sure something like this never happens again. The health district gave us lots of new food safety measures to implement. We hired a food safety guru to train and retrain our staff, managers and chefs. We have a big, new kitchen in which to operate, which will help in our fresh start. We have more room to work, more storage, new systems and technology.

I decided I would make it my goal to make my restaurant operations the safest, tightest, cleanest that we possibly can, not just employing the health district’s recommendations, but going over and above what is expected. We aren’t going to just be “good enough” to pass health inspections. We are going to take the whole place apart and put it back together again to become the best, safest restaurant we can be.

Firefly restaurants will become exemplary operations, a leader in safety and health procedures. That is a promise.

As a result, these are just some of the real, immediate changes we have made to improve our restaurants:

■ We hired a food safety expert with more than 25 years of experience.

■ Our key managers and chefs are certified by ServSafe, a food safety training course.

■ We conducted food safety training for all employees, with the goal of constant improvement and continual training.

■ We are in the process of training a key employee to be a certified ServSafe instructor and proctor, so we will have an actual food safety “professor” on site.

■ We instituted a HACCP (hazard analysis and critical control points) program so we can better monitor the safety of food at every point at which bacterial contamination can occur — from the point we receive the ingredients at the back door till the finished dish arrives at your table.

■ We are conducting rigorous checks of our suppliers to ensure that they provide us with the freshest product available.

Did you know?

■ Food-borne illness affects an estimated 48 million people each year (one out of six), resulting in 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

■ Firefly on Paradise Road alone served more than 250,000 people last year.

■ Firefly restaurants are a locally owned, home-grown company that employs almost 300 great people.

■ Firefly built the first “edible garden” at Rose Warren School a few years ago to teach young kids about real, fresh food, where it comes from and how to prepare and enjoy it. I do cooking seminars there to show kids how to cook yummy, healthy food.

Moving forward

Firefly is back. Our new location two doors down on Paradise Road is open with an A grade. The kitchen is larger than the old location by at least three times. Our Summerlin and Green Valley locations remain open with the newly implemented safety procedures and freshly trained staff.

Many things have kept us from throwing in the towel this last month. But mostly, what has kept us going is those thousands of phone calls, emails, tweets and comments from Firefly fans letting us know that they support us and can’t wait to have us back. Our restaurants are based on personal service. That’s a two-way street. We care about you, and you’ve shown us that you care about us. For that, we are all very grateful.

Thank you from our family and our extended family of 300 employees. From the bottom of my heart, you have my word that every action we take at Firefly will be aimed at the safety of our customers, staff, friends and families. We believe you come first, and we will do everything in our power to win back your loyalty.

Las Vegas resident John Simmons is chef and managing partner of Firefly.

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