Sanitation is nothing new to well-run restaurants

As we continue to live through the fallout of the last several years, I’m surprised to still hear about people who are wary of restaurants in terms of sanitation and safety. I get emails like, “Oh, my husband and I haven’t been to a restaurant in two years!” Really? Other than a hospital, a properly operated restaurant is most probably one of the cleanest places you can be. Successful restaurateurs - the people who have suffered most because of this scare - are actually those who know the most about keeping things clean. I’m talking about properly run restaurants, and the great majority of our eateries in the Cape Region fall into that category.

Few things annoy me more than social media drivel that questions the safety of restaurant food – especially takeout food. The concept of washing hands, sanitizing surfaces, and being aware of what you touch is and always has been a primary focus for quality eateries. In fact, sanitation must be a front-burner concern for any restaurant that wants to stay in business.

Volumes of regulations exist that grew out of real-life encounters with foodborne pathogens and viral/bacterial cross-contamination. Educational programs such as ServSafe (mandatory for kitchen management personnel) address specific situations where food safety could be threatened by temperature, cross-contamination (e.g., between raw meats and “ready to eat” items like lettuce) and exposure to anything that could harbor germs (e.g., a bathroom doorknob). As an interesting aside, the Centers for Disease Control continues to reiterate that there is no evidence to support transmission of COVID-19 through eating food.

As with anything scientific that affects our well-being, ignorance is rampant. For example, I hear people complain that the person preparing their food wasn’t wearing gloves. Seems like a major offense, but most state health inspectors maintain that gloves can give workers a false sense of security when handling non-food items such as money, doorknobs, cans, boxes, etc. The next time you order from a carryout, a truck or a stand, watch the preparer’s hands. Does he or she handle your money and make change wearing the same gloves that touched your burger? If they’re not changed after touching something other than food, gloves actually increase the possibility of pathogen transmission. In the majority of food-handling situations, frequent hand washing has proven to be more effective than the charade of wearing gloves.

Happily, all this attention to science is working, and chances are excellent that your restaurant experiences – takeout and otherwise - will be non-toxic. Furthermore, technical advances and input from the food industry have given rise to updated protocols designed to detect, identify and prevent food safety problems and the transmission of bacteria and viruses.

It’s no secret that guests’ sense of safety is vital to success in the hospitality business. And for the eateries that want to survive, safety is on the front burner all the time.