The Orlando Sentinel reported the Hammered Lamb restaurant shut down in March because of flying insects, roach feces and other health inspection violations.
Turns out, this was news to the Hammered Lamb.
An error in Florida’s state data confused the Hammered Lamb with a vegan restaurant, the true culprit that had failed a state health inspection and was forced to temporarily close. The vegan restaurant was at the Hammered Lamb’s current address — 11 years ago.
After the Sentinel story misidentified the Hammered Lamb, its owner, Jason Lambert, told the newspaper his business took a hit. He lost two catering contracts and his eatery’s reputation suffered amid a flood of negative comments on social media.
“We are actively responding to every comment we get, but many people who read that article won’t respond and just won’t come back to our establishment,” Lambert said, according to the Sentinel. Lambert did not respond to interview requests for this article.
During a recent interview with Poynter, Sentinel Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson, said, “My heart sank. We felt bad for Hammered Lamb and wanted to do anything we could to make it up to them.”
The state uploaded the data with the error March 25 and then corrected the website March 26 after the Sentinel reached out. The Sentinel corrected its original story and followed up with a deeper, more detailed story after the response from the state. Anderson said she never got clear answers about what went wrong although she suspected something was transposed or something overwritten. The Florida Department of Professional and Business Regulation did not respond to questions from Poynter or provide any comment.
Agency spokesperson Kara Lefkowitz told the Sentinel earlier, “The Florida Department of Professional and Business Regulation takes the accuracy of our information very seriously. DBPR updates the public record extracts for the Division of Hotels and Restaurants weekly and proactively reviews inspection reports. As you have already noticed, data correction is performed immediately if any errors exist.”
The Sentinel’s second, longer story, published April 16, included the state’s comment and the Hammered Lamb owner expressing his frustrations on the record. The story also explained the Sentinel’s new policy changes going forward to give restaurant owners more time to respond if the state’s information online was wrong.
The newspaper lifted its paywall, so anyone could read the follow-up story online. It became one of the most read stories on the website for several days, Anderson said.
The Sentinel had been covering restaurant health inspection reports for decades, since before the internet, for consumer protection. Typically the state updates the restaurant violation information every Monday. The Sentinel reports on only the most serious cases, the emergency shutdowns, typically a handful in a six-county coverage area, Anderson said.
This was the first time a situation like this happened, Anderson said.
Foodies, Hammered Lamb regulars, the paper’s readers and even politicians weighed in on the situation following the Sentinel’s April 16 story.
Some people expressed frustration about the newspaper’s having published the mistake in the first place.
State Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, said the restaurant inspection stories are “click-baity articles that are no better than posting mug shots.
“Turns out the state made a mistake & now the small biz has been suffering,” she wrote on X. “All state data should be scrutinized, not taken at face value. Unless the businesses are going to be interviewed & given a chance to respond to their inspection it would be better to just link to the (Health Department) website so folks know where to go vs publish these stories.”
Ted Bridis, who led a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative team at The Associated Press and now teaches investigative journalism as a senior lecturer at the University of Florida, said restaurant inspections are an important public service.
“People want to know, is the Wendy’s down the street safe to order a hamburger?” he said.
Many other people said they would keep eating at Hammered Lamb and supporting the business, which is north of downtown Orlando in the Ivanhoe neighborhood near railroad tracks. The restaurant has developed a cherished reputation for passing out free liquor shots whenever a locomotive goes by.
U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., wrote on X that Hammered Lamb is “an important establishment in the 10th Congressional District and I’ll be heading there ASAP for some amazing brunch!”
‘A wake-up call’
When a newspaper publishes a story with wrong information like this, the implications are far-reaching, Bridis said.
“It’s bad,” he said. “It undermines the credibility further of a news organization when we publish information that turns out to be inaccurate, even when we’re not the ones that got it wrong. We’re supposed to check this stuff.”
Bridis said the restaurant mix-up is a lesson to journalists to always be skeptical of data coming from an official source.
“It just reinforces that we’ve got to do a better job of verifying information that the government gives us,” Bridis said. “I would imagine this is going to be a wake-up call to a lot of editors … who publish these restaurant inspection reports to think, well, sometimes they might be wrong.”
Anderson said the reporter writing the original story also should have contacted the Hammered Lamb for comment and that her reporters will scrutinize the state’s database going forward.
“You’d think the state data is good. … It’s public record, but they make mistakes too,” she said. “We’re going back and checking the state’s data and making sure names match up with addresses.”
From now on, the Sentinel will wait 24 hours before publishing the story to give the reporter more time to hear back from restaurant owners for comment and more time for the state to fix any mistakes online.
Anderson, who is also editor-in-chief of the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, said Orlando’s sister paper will follow the new policy, too.
Bridis praised the Sentinel for quickly correcting the mistake and being transparent about how it happened in a second, stand-alone story.
“I thought it was a smart idea to write a separate story. You don’t bury the correction at the bottom of page three and small type. You want to make the corrected story as prominent as the original erroneous material that you published,” Bridis said.
Taking 24 hours to publish the inspection reports also makes sense, Bridis said.
“It’s very reasonable to say we’re going to slow things down so that we can have more time to check these things out before they’re published,” Bridis said. “A lot of other editors … around Florida probably ought to be thinking the same thing.”
