Taken from KCCI.com
An iconic Marshalltown restaurant, Taylor's Maid Rite, may be forced to close its doors after the state takes issue with the way it has prepared meat for the past 80 years.
The restaurant opened in 1928 and has been booming ever since.
Three years ago, the Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals said it needed to change the way it prepared meat.
Owner Don Taylor Short said the system his restaurant has used for years cooks 65 pounds of meat at once. The state wants Taylor's Maid Rite to use different cookers that only prepare 20 pounds of meat in an hour.
The Maid Rite Corporation also favors switching cookers, saying it thinks cooking raw ground beef in the same vessel used to hold prepared ground beef violates the Food and Drug Administration's rules, as adopted by the state of Iowa.
The new cookers run about $7,000 but Short said the price isn't the issue.
"The options we've been given might be options for stores not as big as ours or as busy as ours, but the volume that we cook and sell to our loyal customers, we have to have the process we use to stay in business," he said.
He said that although he's awaiting a decision on his appeal in the case, if the state rules that the new cookers are mandatory, it will force him to close Taylor's Maid Rite.