City health inspectors found wastewater flooding the kitchen floor, active fly infestations, and improperly sanitised dishes at the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago during a routine visit last December; the latest in a string of regulatory failures to hit Donald Trump's portfolio of hotels and golf clubs across the United States.
According to food inspection records published on the Chicago Data Portal, a city inspector from the Chicago Department of Public Health visited the Near North Side property on 17 December 2025 and issued citations against two of its food outlets: the main kitchen and the rooftop restaurant known as Terrace 16, formerly Sixteen. The hotel's Rebar Lounge and banquets area, inspected on the same visit, received passing grades.
The violations, first reported by NOTUS, landed the property in breach of several Illinois food safety standards, covering everything from pest control to basic hand hygiene; concerns that inspectors say were largely, though not entirely, resolved within a week.
Wastewater on the Floor, Flies at the Bar
The inspector's report documents a troubling series of conditions inside the main kitchen. Three prep sinks were draining directly onto the kitchen floor, leaving standing wastewater across the workspace. The commercial dishwasher, a critical line of defence against foodborne illness, was not reaching the temperatures or chemical concentrations required to properly sanitise crockery and utensils; a finding that carries particular weight in an establishment that serves hundreds of covers each day.
Upstairs at Terrace 16, the rooftop bar and dining space, inspectors counted more than ten small flies throughout the bar area and a further three in the dish area. The report states the inspector 'instructed manager to service all areas affected by pests.'
A cracked lid on the ice machine and debris buildup inside the prep cooler and on the floor beneath sinks compounded the picture. Staff were also observed handling food, including assembling sushi toppings and loading burger buns, without wearing gloves. The employee bathroom, the records show, was not stocked with hand soap.
The hotel manager was instructed to remediate the cited conditions ahead of a follow-up inspection on 23 December 2025. On return, the inspector cleared both the main kitchen and Terrace 16. One item remained outstanding: the cracked ice machine lid, which had still not been repaired or replaced.
This was not the first time the property had run into difficulty with city inspectors. Records reviewed by The Independent show that the hotel's kitchens last failed a food inspection in January 2024, when similar temperature-regulation issues were cited alongside a chef reusing cleaned mollusc shells to serve oysters, a practice prohibited under food safety rules. Those violations were also corrected at a follow-up canvas inspection.
A Pattern Across the Trump Property Portfolio
The Chicago violations sit within a broader pattern of compliance failures documented at Trump-branded properties in recent months. In November 2025, the Westchester County Department of Health inspected Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, New York, on 20 November and cited the club for five health code violations.
According to state health data reviewed by NOTUS, inspectors observed insects and rodents on the premises, and flagged dirty surfaces, food that was uncovered, mislabelled or stored on the floor, poorly constructed rooms in disrepair, inadequate lighting, inadequate ventilation, and missing sneeze guards. None of the violations were classified as critical.
Earlier in the year, in May 2025, the Somerset County Department of Health visited Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and issued 18 health code violations following an inspection on 6 May. The club received a score of 32 out of 100, the lowest recorded grade in Somerset County that month, out of 115 sites inspected.
Nine of the 18 violations were classified as critical, meaning they were deemed capable of posing a serious risk to public health. Inspectors found expired milk in a refrigerator, raw meat stored above ready-to-eat food in the same chilled cabinet, dishwashers not reaching the required 170-degree Fahrenheit sanitisation threshold, and an absence of soap and paper towels at sinks. The inspector's report also noted that the person in charge of the kitchen 'fails to demonstrate knowledge of food safety' and that no one at the facility held a food manager-level certification at the time of the inspection.
David Schutzenhofer, the general manager of Trump National Bedminster, told NJBIZ that the findings amounted to 'clearly nothing more than a politically motivated attack,' Hours after Forbes first published its report on the Bedminster findings, inspectors returned to the site and revised the club's grade upward from 32 out of 100 to 86.
The Chicago Tower's Wider Legal Troubles
The health inspection failures come against a backdrop of more serious and longstanding regulatory problems at the Chicago property. In September 2024, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Thaddeus L. Wilson found that Trump International Hotel & Tower, operating as 401 North Wabash Venture LLC, had violated the Illinois Environmental Protection Act and committed a continuing public nuisance through a series of failures to comply with state and federal law dating back to 2008.
The ruling followed a lawsuit filed in 2018 by then-Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan and later joined by Friends of the Chicago River and the Illinois chapter of the Sierra Club. The suit alleged that the building's cooling water intake system, capable of drawing up to 21 million gallons of water from the Chicago River per day, had sucked fish and other aquatic organisms into its structure, killing thousands, all without the required environmental permits and without conducting the federally mandated studies to minimise harm to wildlife.
The building had also, the court found, underreported the volume of heated water it discharged back into the river by approximately 44 per cent for more than a decade. A 2018 investigation by the Chicago Tribune found that no other building holding cooling intake permits on the river had similarly violated the applicable rules.
The rooftop table at a hotel bearing the president's name may once again carry a passing grade — but the record of how it got there is now part of the public file.
