Restaurant takes hit on social media after being closed for health code violations

Cuca’s #1 in Redlands is only now recovering from the onslaught, which it wasn’t able to combat effectively, according to its general manager. 

Prominently displayed in the front window of Cuca’s #1 Mexican Food restaurant in Redlands is the “A” rating given to it by the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health last month.

Because the downtown restaurant failed a health inspection in February and was shut down briefly, county law requires that it display the large blue letter so its customers know it’s safe to eat there.

If the county didn’t require such a display, Cuca’s #1 probably would have put the sign up anyway. That’s because the open-air establishment, which had never failed a health inspection since it opened in 1989, faced a flood of bad publicity on social media after the closure was announced.

Various posters on Yelp, a site devoted to short customer reviews of restaurants and other businesses, noted the closure and urged people not to eat there. Posters on the Facebook page Redlands Buzz 2.0, a site dedicated to any and all issues in the city, also took negative shots at the restaurant.

Things got so bad that businesses at Cuca’s five other locations – all in the Inland Empire – dropped about 20 percent even though the failed test was restricted to the Redlands location, said Luis Mora, general manager of the Cuca’s chain.

“We would put it up, but I don’t know how much it would help,” said Mora, husband of the restaurant’s founder and owner, Refujio “Cuca” Johnson. “The people who post these things can destroy your reputation and there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s no way to fight back.”

All of Cuca’s restaurants are inspected twice a year, in accordance with health department regulations. On Feb. 27, inspectors found several cockroaches in the kitchen at 527 E. State St., prompting an immediate closure that lasted three days.

“We don’t know how they got there,” Mora said of the incident. “All I can tell you is we’ve never had anything like that happen before.”

Fortunately, the problem was not difficult to fix. Mora hired a local pest control company that got rid of the dreaded bugs immediately, and he has arranged for extra cleanings and more pest-control sprayings to minimize the chance of them coming back.

“We got it cleaned up in about a day and a half,” Mora said. “We called for another inspection and we passed with no problem.”

The restaurant took other action: it fired one manager, demoted two others and brought in managers from its other restaurants to oversee the Redlands location.

At that point, Mora believed the issue was closed, that the restaurant’s clientele would understand that the incident  – which he called “deeply embarrassing” – was an aberration. Certainly Cuca’s #1 wasn’t alone: 27 other San Bernardino County restaurants were shut down during the past two month for various health code violations, according to the health department’s website.

But almost immediately, Mora began noticing a drop business at all six restaurants, a drop that he said didn’t start to subside until several weeks ago, perhaps because most of the negative postings were no longer accessible.

Cuca’s #1’s plight is an example how the internet and social media have changed the nature of communication, said Lou Desmond, president of Desmond & Louis, Inc. a communications firm based in the Inland Empire.

“Ten years ago this would have been a three-day event and that would have been the end of it,” Desmond said. “Hardly anyone would have known about it. Now it’s all over the place immediately.”    Desmond compared the social media effort against Cuca’s #1 to “Telephone,”  the children’s game in which a message is passed silently by students from one end of the classroom to another.  By the time the message reaches the last student, it bears little or no resemblance to the original message.

“The amount of disinformation that gets spread around is amazing,” Desmond said.

Mora pointed out that Per Se, a high-end restaurant in Manhattan, got multiple health code violations three years ago, and that an unopened pub owned by famed television chef Gordon Ramsay got a “C” rating from the Southern Nevada Health District in 2012.

“This can happen to even the best restaurants,” Mora said,

The campaign against Cuca’s #1 was “well-organized, and aggressive,”  but it’s impossible to say who was behind it or how it was put together so quickly, Desmond said.

“It obviously came from someone who had an axe to grind,” Desmond said. “You could speculate and say it was their competitors, but there’s no way of knowing for certain.”

Most restaurants get their share of customer reviews on Yelp or Facebook, but a flurry of negative reviews after a health code violation is unusual, said Claudia Doyle, spokeswoman for the health department.

“I’ve never heard of that happening,” Doyle said.

Ultimately, the health department treated Cuca’s #1 fairly and got the restaurant back on its feet as quickly as it could, Mora said.

“They were very fair and very professional,” Mora said. “It wasn’t like they were trying to put us out of business, and we had no problem with anything they did. They were just doing their job.”