What hygiene and safety standards should a restaurant follow?

What hygiene and safety standards should a restaurant follow?

When we delve into the management of catering establishments, one of the most important chapters, if not the most important, is related to hygiene and food safety. It is very easy to break the cold chain, incorrectly handle some products or not strictly follow the cleaning measures for surfaces and work areas in a kitchen: any failure in this regard can lead to contamination of the preparations and cause, at least, some poisoning.

Aimed at preventing and resolving any risk situation is the HACCP system, a system that consists of analyzing hazards and critical control points and putting the means to prevent them: let’s remember that in the kitchen the objective is prevention. This system is mandatory in all establishments where any type of food is prepared and comprises the application of rules depending on each location, that is, it is a set of exclusive guidelines for each center.

Hygiene and safety measures in a restaurant.

Currently, to all these measures that all restaurateurs are aware of and put into practice to their ultimate consequences, we must add the measures that must be taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Basically, the primary measure is cleaning and disinfection: the more times we wash our hands and disinfect all surfaces and rooms, the better. But let’s see what more concrete measures we should take‌.

We will start with a series of general recommendations, such as maintaining a safe distance between customers that should be around 2 meters. The arrangement of the tables on the terraces and within the establishment must take this measure into account, so the capacity of the catering centers must surely be considerably reduced.

These measures will be much more complicated to maintain among the bar or restaurant workers since ‌kitchens and rooms hardly allow these distances to be maintained, so in this case others must be taken, such as:

• Avoid touching your mouth, eyes, and nose.

• Use masks and gloves.

• Increased frequency of hand washing.

As much information as possible should be disseminated among all the workforce through posters and guides with the hygiene regulations, likewise, they should be provided with all the material to proceed with the cleaning with the greatest guarantees: we are talking about hydro- alcohol, detergents, and disinfectants suitable for each of the different food handling and service areas.

As regards the service itself, we can adopt a series of measures to avoid contagion and to provide security to the client:

• We will avoid crowds by distributing customers in time slots through reservations.

• We will clean tables and chairs with alcohol before and after each service.

• We will promote single-use table linen: it would be convenient to use tablecloths and paper napkins, which will be discarded after each service.

• We will avoid the traditional use of the menu, which we will replace with blackboards and panels strategically located in the premises and with technology through QR code access.

• Preferably we will facilitate payment by electronic means avoiding the money physically.

Greatest risk of contagion

One of the points with the greatest risk of contagion occurs at the time of receipt of goods, so we will take extreme precautions, immediately discarding all superfluous packaging, and placing it in the places set up for this purpose.

Another point to check is ventilation. We will not use the option of removing the air from our air conditioning unit, but we will continually renew it, ensuring that the filters are in perfect condition. It is preferable if we cannot guarantee this, to resort to mechanical ventilation systems.

In conclusion, regardless of the rules that traditionally must be followed in any food preparation center, today, we must maintain some additional measures that are summarized in maintaining a safe distance, use of masks and gloves, avoiding physical contact with other people, and, above all, extreme hand washing and cleaning of all surfaces, as well as maintaining our uniform and our personal hygiene.

Regarding customers, we must control the capacity and maintain in any case a safety distance greater than one and a half meters, providing disinfection material at the entrance of the premises and in the service areas.

Probably, within a few months, Covid-19 will be fully under control, but it would not hurt to maintain many of these habits, since they will avoid more than one upset in terms of our health.