Hollandaise Daze

Portlanders love to go out for breakfast, but there is a small group of breakfast eaters who aren’t in love with the eggs benedict served at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in NE Portland. A year ago a group of county commissioners gathered for a nationwide meeting. A handful of the attendees ate eggs benedict at the hotel and got sick. One of them, North Carolina’s Bill Stanley, was ill enough that he had to go to the hospital. The 83-year-old recently sued Hollander Investments, the company that owns the hotel.

An investigation discovered that the hollandaise sauce was the culprit. More than a half-dozen people got sick from the sauce that morning, and two of them were hospitalized, including Stanley. The sauce apparently was not kept at high enough temperatures. The bacterium that sickened the people was Staphylococcus aureus. The hotel, which received good marks from health inspectors, has since removed hollandaise sauce from its menu.

Still, Stanley is not happy with the hotel’s settlement offer. Though two other people who were sickened by the sauce have settled with Hollander Investments, Stanley was unable to reach a satisfactory agreement with the company, thus prompting the lawsuit, filed by Seattle attorney Drew Falkenstein. Stanley is asking for compensation to cover his medical expenses, which he says reached some $14,000, plus a minimum of $26,000 in noneconomic damages.

For more on this story, see this article.