Porteous v. St. Ann's Cafe & Deli

713 So. 2d 454, 1998 WL 271838
CourtSupreme Court of Louisiana
DecidedMay 29, 1998
Docket97-C-0837
StatusPublished
Cited by27 cases

This text of 713 So. 2d 454 (Porteous v. St. Ann's Cafe & Deli) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Louisiana primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Porteous v. St. Ann's Cafe & Deli, 713 So. 2d 454, 1998 WL 271838 (La. 1998).

Opinion

713 So.2d 454 (1998)

Donald C. PORTEOUS, Jr.
v.
ST. ANN'S CAFE & DELI and Lafayette Insurance Company.

No. 97-C-0837.

Supreme Court of Louisiana.

May 29, 1998.

Geoffrey H. Longenecker, Madisonville, for Applicant.

Alexander Adam Lambert, John Thomas Holmes, Metairie, for Respondent.

Prior report: 693 So.2d 786.

*455 CALOGERO, Chief Justice.[*]

On January 22, 1995, Donald C. Porteous, Jr. was dining at St. Ann's Cafe & Deli. While eating the second half of an oyster poboy, he bit down onto a small, grey, and roughly round substance, which apparently was a pearl. When plaintiff bit onto the pearl, he broke a tooth and cracked it all the way down the shaft. The plaintiff reported the incident to a waiter. The waiter wrote an incident report and took possession of the remainder of the sandwich and the pearl. Two days later, plaintiff went to his dentist and thereafter underwent dental treatment, which included a root canal and placement of a crown atop the broken tooth. The plaintiff then sued St. Ann's Cafe & Deli and Lafayette Insurance Company, alleging that the defendant was negligent because of the lack of adequate food inspection procedures, which resulted in the presence of an injurious substance and his sustaining injury to his tooth.

In determining whether the defendant was liable for the plaintiff's injuries, the trial court applied the "foreign-natural" test. That test was adopted from the common law. Louisiana courts of appeal have used this common law test to determine the liability of a restaurant when a customer is injured by a harmful substance in the restaurant's food. Melady v. Wendy's of New Orleans, Inc., 95-913 (La.App. 5th Cir. 4/16/96); 673 So.2d 1094; Johnson v. South Pacific Canning Co., 580 So.2d 556 (La.App. 5th Cir. 1991); Riviere v. J.C. Penney Comp., 478 So.2d 965 (La.App. 5th Cir.1985); Title v. Pontchartrain Hotel, 449 So.2d 677 (La.App. 4th Cir.1984); Loyacano v. Continental Ins., 283 So.2d 302 (La.App. 4th Cir.1973); Musso v. Picadilly Cafeterias, Inc., 178 So.2d 421 (La.App. 1st Cir.1965). Under the foreignnatural test, if the injurious substance is foreign to the food, then the restaurant is strictly liable. If the injurious substance is natural to the food, there is no strict liability. Rather, liability is imposed only if the restaurant was negligent in failing to discover and remove the harmful natural substance from the food.

After applying the foreign-natural test, the trial court held that although the injurious pearl was natural to the oyster, the restaurant was negligent, and therefore liable, because of the lack of adequate procedures to ensure that injurious substances, such as a pearl in the oyster, were not served on the po-boys. The plaintiff was then awarded damages plus costs and interest.

The court of appeal recited the facts found by the trial court and declared that the "trial court's determination of credibility and findings of fact will not be disturbed on appeal so long as they are reasonable in light of the record as a whole." The court of appeal concluded that the trial court's finding that the restaurant negligently failed to institute procedures to intercept harmful objects in the oysters was a reasonable finding and would not be disturbed on appeal. Thus, the trial court was affirmed in the court of appeal. Porteous v. St. Ann's Cafe & Deli No. 96-CA-2692 (La.App. 4th Cir. 3/5/97) (unpublished opinion).

We granted certiorari to determine if the law and the facts were properly applied in this restaurant-harmful food product case, a precise matter which has not been addressed in recent decades by this Court. For the reasons that follow, we find that the lower courts erred in applying the common law foreign-natural test. Rather, the proper analysis to determine the defendant's liability is to be found in Louisiana's substantive law as found in the Louisiana Civil Code in the articles relating to liability and damages for offenses and quasi offenses—the traditional duty risk tort analysis.[1] With the entire record now in hand, we hold that, under the *456 traditional duty risk tort analysis, the plaintiff has failed to prove that the defendant breached its duty to act as would a reasonably prudent restauranteur in selecting, preparing and cooking food, including removal of injurious substances. We therefore reverse the judgments of the lower courts.[2]

DISCUSSION

In the recent decades, this Court has not spoken on this issue and the Louisiana Courts of Appeal have borrowed the foreignnatural test from the common law. We decline to adopt that test.[3]

The Civil Code is the chief repository of the substantive law of Louisiana, and as previously indicated, the theory of recovery available to an injured plaintiff to determine the liability of a restaurant in a case of this sort is the determination of negligence with the traditional duty risk tort analysis. See La. Civ.Code Ann. arts. 2315, 2316.

TORT CLAIM

Articles 2315 and 2316 are the codal bases for a claim in tort. Article 2315 states that "[e]very act whatever of man that causes damage to another obliges him by whose fault it happened to repair it." Article 2316 provides that "[e]very person is responsible for the damage he occasions not merely by his act, but by his negligence, his *457 imprudence, or his want of skill." To determine whether a defendant is negligent, the case usually requires proof of five separate elements: (1) duty; (2) breach of duty; (3) cause-in-fact; (4) scope of liability or scope of protection; and (5) damages. Roberts v. Benoit, 605 So.2d 1032, 1051 (La.1991) (on rehearing) (citing Fowler v. Roberts, 556 So.2d 1, 4 (La.1989) (on original hearing)). Relative to these five elements, the case at hand turns on two of the elements—the issue of the defendant's duty and the defendant's breach of duty—discussion regarding which follows.

Duty of the Defendant

A defendant's duty to conform his conduct to a specific standard may be express or implied, either statutorily or jurisprudentially. Faucheaux v. Terrebonne Consolidated Government, 615 So.2d 289, 292 (La.1993). In Louisiana, there is no statute which expressly addresses a commercial restaurant's duty to serve food free of injurious substances.[4] There is, nonetheless, no doubt that there is and should be such a duty. We determine that the duty is the following: A food provider, in selecting, preparing and cooking food, including the removal of injurious substances, has a duty to act as would a reasonably prudent man skilled in the culinary art in the selection and preparation of food.[5]

Breach of Duty

Plaintiff alleges that the defendant restaurant breached its duty by acting unreasonably in the selection, preparation and cooking of the food because the restaurant lacked adequate inspection procedures to detect and remove injurious substances from the food served to its customers. The defendant, on the other hand, asserts that it did not breach its duty because it acted reasonably in the selection and preparation of the food product at issue.

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Bluebook (online)
713 So. 2d 454, 1998 WL 271838, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/porteous-v-st-anns-cafe-deli-la-1998.