By Richard Mullins |
The Tampa Tribune
Imagine washing your hands long enough to sing "Happy Birthday," slowly, twice.
Thirty seconds or so is how long restaurant workers should wash their hands any time they touch a dirty dish, absent-mindedly scratch an eyebrow, or crack an egg.
Enforcing such rigor is the key to running a kitchen clean enough to earn perfect scores from county health departments. Florida has only a few of these perfect restaurants, and chefs who run them offer some tough advice: Hire outside inspectors, treat the ice machine as a potential felon and become fanatical about details that others overlook.
"Are the Coke machine nozzles clean? Is the ice machine maintained? Are the trash cans clean? Because when you drag them through a kitchen, they're a great way to transport waste and disease," said Mark Brown, executive chef of The Sanctuary Golf Club on Sanibel Island, one of just a half-dozen kitchens to earn perfect inspection scores this past autumn.
"This is something you have to train on every single day, over and over. … My first year here, I think the staff was ready to hang me."
More than 11,000 inspections were recorded in Hillsborough County during the past six months, and only 4 percent of the locations received perfect scores. Among them: Acropolis Greek Taverna in Ybor City, three Beef O' Brady's locations, a Five Guys in the Skypoint tower downtown, and Lee Roy Selmon's in the Westshore district.
Woody's Sub Shop north of Ybor City earned perfect scores for a full year.
By contrast, state records show 328 Hillsborough locations had more than 10 "critical" violations, such as pest infestation or refrigerators not cold enough, while 12 of those had more than 20 critical violations and one reached the stage of a penalty undefined $2,700.
To avoid that fate, the most rigorous restaurant operators get out front of the health department inspections. They contract private companies for extra inspections, with standards much tougher than the government's.
"The good restaurants know the most important thing is to make the customer happy," said Beth Cannon, associate director of quality assurance for the inspection company Steritech Group Inc.
"Maybe the managers aren't always happy when we show up for an inspection, but they're also really not happy if you end up with a customer who's embracing the porcelain that night."
Cannon explains the rigor to her own friends by asking how they bake a cake at home. Do you wear gloves? Do you wash your hands after cracking the eggs? Do you dry your hands with a common dish towel?
"Now think about how busy people are in a busy restaurant, serving hundreds of people a night, every night," Cannon said. "And try to get that perfect score every time. It's not easy."
The best practices fall into a few general categories: refrigeration and storage, cross-contamination, pest control and training.
Refrigeration might seem the most critical item in a restaurant, but an ice machine is nearly a ticking time bomb, said Brown of the Sanctuary Golf Club.
"Yes, the ice is cold," he said. "But the flap door is 40 to 50 degrees, which is a perfect temperature for mold growth."
So, Brown has an employee take apart ice machines every other week and sterilize the parts. Brown tore out the shelves in his brand-new walk-in cooler and spent $6,000 for removable shelves he can run through industrial dishwashers.
While some restaurants refrigerate soup in 5-gallon buckets, Brown said that's far too large a container to cool down enough to prevent bacteria growth. So his chefs seal and date soup in small bags, and soak them in ice water before storage in the refrigerator.
With potentially risky items like oysters, his kitchen keeps records on every one for a year, so any problems can be tracked back to a particular harvester.
Cross-contamination happens in even the smallest instances.
For instance, if a dish-washing employee sprays off plates, loads them in the dishwashing machine and then forgets to wash his hands when unloading the machine, he'll track potential illnesses to the clean plates.
If a kitchen worker stacks boxes of vegetables on the floor, those boxes will track germs from the floor into the refrigerator.
If a chef prepares patties of raw hamburger, even while wearing gloves, and wipes his hands on his apron, he can track potential bacteria and germs into the "hot" side of the kitchen when grilling burgers.
If a salad chef accidentally touches his nose and then grabs a head of lettuce, he can potentially transfer hepatitis A.
Cannon at Steritech said the company has a strict protocol if an inspector spots an employee who looks sick: Start an interview with the employee and list his symptoms. In some cases, the inspector might even notify the local health department.
Pest control isn't optional for any restaurant, especially in Florida.
Florida inspects more than 51,000 sites, at least twice a year.It shut down 90 of them immediately in the past three months for "emergency" reasons: 75 of those for cockroach or rodent activity, according to state records.
Every major restaurant company keeps a pest-control contractor on call 24 hours a day, Brown said, and given the climate in Florida, it's not an issue that can be tackled after someone spots a problem.
Training a kitchen full of employees on all the right practices isn't simple, particularly with the high turnover in the restaurant industry.
Five Guys uses Steritech for periodic inspections, but it also employs "mystery eaters" to review each location at least twice a week, grading everything from the bathroom floors to the quality of the fries, said Jo Jo Jiampetti, a regional vice president for Five Guys in Tampa.
Any location that records a 100 percent score can earn an extra $700 to split evenly among employees.
At every Five Guys, workers twice a day go through a 200-point inspection. Is the cooler temperature less than 41 degrees? Is anyone using bare hands with food? Are there dry paper towels at each hand-wash station?
The questions get even more detailed: Are paper cups stacked open side down, and is the bottom cup covered in a lid so that one cup that touched the counter never went to a customer?
"There are so many moving parts," Jiampetti said. "You have to teach every day what the standards are, and hold everyone accountable."
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