Splat-ter of the Week: Cafe del Soul

A mere two days into NaBloPoMo, it's already time for Splat-ter of the Week. And not a moment too soon, because coming up with last night's content was as easy as extracting the truth from a politician.

And with that, we'll try not to mention politics again in this post. 

To find this week's splat-ter we had to go all the way to Marin County, California, home of an organic fast food establishment called Cafe Del Soul.

As most people know, restaurants generally have to meet stringent food handling, storage and cleanliness requirements to protect the patrons who eat there.  A local government unit like the Board of Health then polices for infractions by conducting random inspections.  And every now and then, a restaurant comes clean, so to speak, and turns itself in.

And so it was that Cafe del Soul confessed this week.  A sign posted at the entrance a few days ago informed patrons that the restaurant had a little pest problem: It was infested by German cockroaches.  The eatery went a step further and reported the issue, which it detected in May, to local health authorities.

We appreciate the honesty but have to wonder about a couple things.  First, why mention the German thing? Does cockroach nationality play a prominent role in deciding where to eat? We, for one, have a hard time picturing customers seeing the sign, turning around, and muttering, "Oh no, not the German cockroaches. If only they'd been infested by less ambitious ambitious ones, like the French..."

Second, it's great that the company confessed, but we haven't figured out why it took them the full length of the Major League Baseball season to do it. (There's probably a good reason, but what with it being NaBloPoMo, we have about 30 minutes for investigative journalism.)

Third, the joint is still open. Even more surprising, people don't seem to mind the sign because they're still eating there.  Could be that we missed it when German cockroaches got added to the Paleo diet.

Regardless, we invite Cafe del Soul to step up and get its golden pancake, sans German cockroaches because those are extra. (We're pretty proud of ourselves for writing a whole post about cockroaches without making a single joke about politicians. It wasn't easy.)