Tampa restaurant garnished plates with foxtail ferns from outside. Is that OK?

TAMPA — The foxtail ferns were everywhere.

They snaked across the wooden tray in front of me, poking between dishes at a dinner in March. They were all over Yelp and Instagram and TikTok, where influencers smiled coyly behind platters covered with the green sprigs. They even made an appearance on the restaurant’s website, where they perched quietly in a background photo, hovering over the reservation portal below.

In January, the Tampa Bay Times received a tip that Ko, a Tampa Heights spot, was taking the ferns from a plot of land behind the building and using them to garnish plates. The restaurant is owned by the management group that operates Kosen, a tasting menu restaurant in the same building that recently snagged a Michelin star.

Video showed an employee snipping plants from the courtyard of the neighboring Pearl Apartments — an area where dogs frequently go to the bathroom and where runoff water from the building’s garage can seep into the soil.

I ate at Ko two months ago and saw the ferns for myself. The bright green plants were draped across an elaborate spread of tiny bites as part of the kaiseki restaurant’s “hassun” course, a 10-item tasting that evening.

Save for a lone sprig here and there, the plants were mostly not touching my food, and when I inquired whether they were edible, our server — the restaurant’s director of operations, Max Lipton — informed me that they were not.

But something about it didn’t sit right. My bill for two people came to $464.40, after tax and a mandatory 20% service charge.

At that price, I expected a little more than decorations foraged from a patch used for dog relief.

And I had some questions.

Were the ferns stolen? Were they washed? Had they been sprayed with insecticide and pesticides and who knows what else? Mostly, I just wondered why. Why was a restaurant of this caliber doing something that seemed foolish at best and illegal and dangerous at worst?

When reached by phone Friday, Johnny Tung, an Orlando-based restaurateur who together with his brother, Jimmy, owns Kosen and Ko, said he was unaware of the practice. Later that day, he replied that Lipton had been under the impression that “it was not a cause for concern as long as everything is properly sanitized and not touching the food.”

If the plants were in fact washed prior to plating, was there a world in which this practice was actually OK?

Getting to the bottom of this was more complicated than expected.

Kosen and Ko opened in fall 2023 and are owned by the Tung’s Orlando-based Omei Restaurant Group. The duo started the fast-casual Bento chain 20 years ago in Gainesville and now have 25 locations throughout the state. The group owns several other Orlando-area restaurants, including Zaru, Doshi and Camille, another Michelin-starred restaurant, and has built a reputation on offering mentorship and resources to many up-and-coming Orlando-area chefs.

Though they share the same space, Kosen and Ko are two separate restaurants, with separate chefs and menus. On the Kosen side, a 20-course menu is helmed by chef Wei Chen in the Japanese omakase style. (Dinner there comes to $362 per person, after tax and tip.) Chen previously worked at Kappo Masa, one of several high-end sushi restaurants from acclaimed Japanese chef Masa Takayama. At Ko, a 10-course kaiseki menu is run by chef Andrew Huang, formerly the head chef at Uchiko Houston in Texas.

I showed photographs of the foxtail ferns to researchers with the University of Florida, who identified them as Asparagus densiflorus, a low-growing perennial popular with landscapers. The plant has a “low severity” poison and can cause mild skin irritation upon contact and low toxicity if consumed. The Times also obtained video of dogs going to the bathroom in the fern bed.

Marc S. Frank, an extension botanist with the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and a collection manager with the Florida Museum of Natural History’s herbarium, was troubled by what may happen to the plants before the restaurant snips them.

“My concern is that if they are harvesting it from a neighboring apartment complex, there is no telling what insecticides or other chemicals (such as heavy metals or petrochemicals) may be present in the soil where the ferns are growing,” he said.

I reached out to agencies across the state and country to see whether they could weigh in on what the restaurant was doing. I was interested in the legality of urban foraging, which usually refers to ingredients that are consumed. I wanted to understand what, if any, rules the restaurant was breaking by plating the plants as garnish.

An email to Tampa Police confirmed that it’s illegal to take plants from public parks. For private property, it depends on permission from the property owner. Two managers for the Pearl Apartment residential complex and the building’s retail operations said they didn’t know the restaurant was taking the ferns and they had not given them permission to do so.

“What people want to do on their own time is on them — there’s no approval on our end,” said Destini Garza, the assistant manager at the Pearl. “We can’t monitor what they do 24/7 … obviously if we catch them we’ll take the necessary steps.”

Talking to someone at the state level proved a little trickier. I contacted the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Services, the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association, the Florida Department of Health in Hillsborough County and the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. All of them referred me to Florida’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation, the main agency charged with inspecting and licensing restaurants.

As it turns out, the agency had already paid the restaurant several visits. And it wasn’t the first time Ko had been caught plating foraged plants. Records show that on Jan. 4 an inspector issued a “stop sale” order — a directive to halt the sale and supervise the destruction of a food that could represent a threat to public safety — “due to food originating from an unapproved source.”

“Pine branch used as garnish from back of restaurant,” sanitation and safety specialist Robert Singer wrote in his report, noting the issue as a “high priority” and adding that the violation was “corrected on-site” after the chef discarded the garnish.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Food Code, all food should be obtained by sources that comply with the law (food cooked in a private home can’t be sold in a food establishment without special licensing, for example), and all food must be “honestly presented,” meaning it’s not served in a way that could mislead or misinform the consumer.

The restaurant kept harvesting the fern and plating food with it after the January violation was issued, evidenced by Times images taken in April, multiple images shown on the restaurant’s own social media feeds, and my own dining experience there.

In a statement, Lipton, the director of operations, said the plants were used “strictly for decorative purposes” and did not come into direct contact with food. Images on social media from 2023 show a dish of tempura-battered mushrooms nestled in and touching a bundle of the ferns, a practice that Tung said the restaurant stopped.

Despite defending the use of the foxtail fern as a garnish, Lipton said the restaurant will no longer decorate dishes with the plants at all.

“We understand that the use of outdoor plants in a dining setting may raise questions about sanitation,” he wrote. “We take community feedback seriously and recognize the importance of public perception in our operations. To address these concerns proactively, we have decided to discontinue using these local plants as garnishes in the future.”

I reached out to the Department of Business and Professional Regulation again, to relay Ko’s response, and asked whether the fern usage was acceptable if the plants were sanitized and not touching food on the plate. The agency did not respond to several emails sent since Friday.

Throughout my reporting, I kept asking myself why the restaurant would resort to a practice like this.

In casual conversations I had with chefs and industry professionals in the Tampa Bay area and across the country, they all agreed: It was definitely in bad taste.

Food that’s on your plate should be edible, period. And though Ko may not have been breaking any major food codes, garnishing dishes with inedible or potentially hazardous ingredients is generally frowned upon by food safety experts.

“There are a whole host of issues with the practice you have described,” said Brooke A. Benschoter, the director of communications for the Association of Food and Drug Officials.

But in this age of social media showmanship, inedible decor shows up on restaurant plates more often than you might think. I’ve come across everything from oysters spread on top of empty sea shells and plastic seaweed to sorbet nestled on a mound of acorns. Flowers and plants not meant for human consumption often poke up out of cocktails in decorative fashion.

Both Kosen and Ko have relied heavily on influencer marketing, which prioritizes aesthetics: Videos shared on TikTok and Instagram from influencers dining at both spaces are all over the restaurants’ social feeds, and many of the reels on Ko’s are chock-full of ferns.

My dinner at Kosen next door was spectacular, each course a delightful pairing of flavor and texture, with intricate details and thorough explanations from chef Chen woven throughout the comprehensive 2 1/2-hour dinner. The evening’s highlights included thoughtful wine and sake pairings, an impossibly silky chawanmushi topped with ikura and uni, and a lengthy nigiri course, with standouts like a shima-aji (striped jack) and a smoky, melt-in-your mouth saba, or mackerel.

But dinner at Ko felt different: hasty, almost rushed at points. The evening started out strong, with an A5 wagyu and onion cream tart and a delicious live Hokkaido scallop, but had more than a few bumps, beginning with the unfortunate fern plating and culminating with a particularly poor dessert course. I left unimpressed.

When Michelin inspectors bestowed their coveted one-star rating to Kosen, it appeared they had dined only at that restaurant and not at Ko. They praised chef Chen’s omakase as well as his “showmanship and style.”

When I pointed out the foxtail fern practice at Ko to Michelin, press officer Carly Grieff responded with a vague and evasive response: “The MICHELIN Guide encourages restaurant consumers to contact the appropriate authorities, should an issue arise while dining in an establishment resulting in health or safety issues. The MICHELIN Guide is not a legal entity and it would like to reiterate that it believes and respects laws, including the principle of presumption of innocence.”

While I don’t think the staff or management at Ko had any intention of endangering public health, the use of the foxtail ferns feels like a thoughtless and careless choice.

What may have looked great at the dinner table and in photographs online can’t be worth the embarrassment. And with such a hefty price tag attached, it feels particularly offensive.