Clean Enough to Eat Off Of

Few things can bring your business to an immediate, grinding halt more effectively than actually hurting customers with your food. With all this in mind, let's look at the issue of kitchen sanitation in a practical way, broken down into 10 critical points that will be easy to apply in our restaurants.

Most of us don't get into the restaurant business because of an attraction to the field of sanitation and public health.

More likely, we chose this path because of a love of food and wine, a proclivity to hospitality, or the possibility of turning a passion (or, at least a talent) into a livelihood. Nonetheless, we all find that in addition to the obvious, we must also gain more than a passing familiarity with a wide variety of extra-culinary skills. Marketing, bookkeeping, child psychology (I'm thinking of our employees here), insurance and plumbing, to name just a few, all come to mind. Although each of these topics is crucial, none compare to the importance of establishing good sanitation practices in our kitchens. Few things can bring your business to an immediate, grinding halt more effectively than actually hurting customers with your food.

With all this in mind, let's look at the issue of kitchen sanitation in a practical way, broken down into 10 critical points that will be easy to apply in our restaurants.

One: Create Awareness of the Three Types of Food Contaminants

The three basic types of contaminants that we have to deal with in our kitchens are physical, chemical and biological.