Alice's Teacup Among NYC Restaurants Ticketed Over City Inspections

If you live on the Upper East Side, odds are that an Alice's Tea Cup is somewhere in your vicinity—for that matter, if you live in the West 70s, you have one too. So the teahouse that is one of several to introduce the idea of "teatime" to a coffee-chugging city, with cute-as-a-button interiors and a lot of mention of how it is "magical" and "whimsical" is suing the city of New York. Specifically, their Chapter II location at 156 East 64th Street is suing New York after health inspections dragged out too long.

Their establishment was closed on March 2 in 2007, and didn't reopen again for eight days until March 10, 2007—and they are claiming that the city was too slow to inspect again so that they could reopen and they lost good business and good reputation in the bad publicity that a DOH closing sign can bring. Now I have no idea if this is true, not being privy to the bookkeeping of their business, but I could see how an establishment might lose some consumer confidence after temporary closing for health inspections. (See: Veneiro's bakery with the rodent droppings in the chocolate.)

Of course, now that the DOH is temporarily closing restaurants and bakeries left and right due to failure to meet health inspections, not only does Alice's suit seem like a moot point (sorry, Alice), it also seems soon we'll have nowhere left to eat that didn't cover mouse holes properly anyway. So now I'm curious—did you ever have a beloved establishment that you kept patronizing regardless of prior health violations? Or does that white sign damper your perspective on a place forever?