A night out for a Perth family in June 2024 turned into a medical emergency when two young sisters were served a citronella torch and lamp oil solution instead of cranberry juice at a Crawley restaurant. This week, that failure came at a price: $40,000.
On Tuesday, 3 March, former owner Michele Angiuli was found guilty at Perth Magistrates Court of selling unsafe food and failing to exercise due diligence, along with two other related charges. Angiuli and his company were each fined $20,000, with the court also ordering payment of almost $20,000 in legal costs.
Hannah Lemin, 12, and her 11-year-old sister Olivia were dining with their parents at Miky's Italian Fusion in Crawley when they complained that their cranberry juice tasted "poisoned". Their parents soon learned the girls had been served a pink citronella torch and lamp oil solution, a toxic insect-repellent product, instead of juice.
"My husband grabbed it and looked at it and he said 'it's citronella oil mixed with insect repellent, you've poisoned them,'" the girls' mother, Michele Lemin, later recounted. "The girls were crying. There was instant burning because they swallowed it. They spat some out but they had also swallowed it. I had swallowed it too and the taste was awful."
The children were rushed to Perth Children's Hospital and Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital to be treated, and a WA Department of Health investigation was launched. At hospital, the children experienced headaches, burning sensations in their stomachs, and tingling. The girls were kept under observation for several hours before being released.
The girls' father, Marcus Lemin, had immediately confronted restaurant staff and asked to see the bottle, but the staff member refused, claiming it was "just old cranberry juice". "He took the bottle out of the fridge and placed it under the counter. That's when I said, 'No, you need to give me the bottle, I need to see what it is'," Marcus said.
Magistrate Donna Webb said the venue showed clear signs of poor management, including inadequate staff training and a lack of required food-safety certifications. The magistrate emphasised the severity of the incident, noting that if the children had ingested more of the citronella, the outcome could have been dire: "The children were young. But for the fact it was citronella and it tasted disgusting and they spat it out immediately, the consequences could have been more serious."
The case raises legitimate questions about the adequacy of food safety enforcement across Western Australia's hospitality sector. In determining the penalty, Magistrate Webb referenced similar cases, including a 2019 incident where children were served marijuana-laced brownies, and a separate case involving metal filings found in food. That the court needed to reach back to those precedents suggests incidents of this gravity are, thankfully, rare. But the structural conditions that allowed a toxic chemical to sit in a restaurant fridge alongside drink ingredients are hardly unique to one venue.
Advocates for stronger regulatory oversight argue that current food safety frameworks place too much trust in self-compliance, with inspections often infrequent and certification requirements inconsistently enforced. The Food Standards Australia New Zealand framework sets the national baseline, but compliance falls to individual states and local councils, a model that critics say creates enforcement gaps.
On the other side of that argument, the hospitality industry operates on tight margins, and small operators frequently cite the administrative burden of compliance as a genuine pressure. Mandatory training regimes and certification costs are not trivial for a neighbourhood restaurant. The question is not whether standards should exist, but whether the consequences of ignoring them are currently weighty enough to change behaviour.
Angiuli's lawyer told the court his client had since lost the business and no longer worked in the hospitality industry. Outside the court, Marcus Lemin said he hoped the case would drive greater rigour across the industry: "I think the issue for me is more that it drives a bit more rigour in the industry and that we get to a point where maybe business owners in the hospitality industry understand the accountabilities they hold."
That framing is worth sitting with. A $40,000 fine, shared between a now-defunct business and its former owner, is a proportionate response to what the facts show: a foreseeable and preventable failure of basic food handling discipline. The broader takeaway, for regulators and operators alike, is that food safety obligations are not a paperwork exercise. They are the difference between a family dinner and a night in a hospital emergency department.