We are never eating at a restaurant again!

[Joe (SoCal)]

But… Anya Taylor-Joy!

I’ll rewatch Queens Gambit or The Norseman to get my fix.

[JayInOz]

yeah, that fixed it right up. Attachment 127829



seriously? touché... and win?

I left out a friggin comma Fred. What do you want? Public flagellation? Maybe lop off a finger- how 'bout this one? JayInOz

[bamamick]

My wife worked in the restaurant business for a long time, and when I read Katherine’s post to her she just nodded her head and said ‘uh huh’. I guess we don’t really know how the sausage is made, do we? I will say that she always, always checks out the health inspection numbers before we sit down anywhere.

Mickey Lake

[SaltyD from BC]

Inland small Mexican village street food. Hey, they pack everything up every night so it can only get so bad? After a week I started to appreciate that the cooks are pretty skillful at keeping the flies from landing. Much.

[Jim Bow]

Is she on the menu?

No, but she does portray a woman of ill repute.

[sandtown]

When the Rear Commodores at our sailing club take office, they are required to attend the Health Dept's food safety school . . .

tons of good information there.

For a year, the Rears are responsible for the galley. It is actually kind of daunting.

We feed a lot of people, but haven't killed anyone yet . . .

knock on a Wooden Boat !!

But our state GOP extremists pretty much want to shut the county Health Depts down.

What could possibly go wrong ??

[Nicholas Carey]

I've only worked in two types of restaurants the type that McMike has been in and the type that you could literally eat off the kitchen floor.
Seriously at the end of service the ENTIRE kitchen, walls, floors, ceiling, and every imaginable surface was hand scrubbed and sanitized by a brigade de cuisine staff working on their hands and knees with buckets of hot soapy water and scrub brushes until it was gleaming perfection. These are places where the walk-ins are immaculate and every container is sealed, marked and dated. Bathrooms are impeccable and there is 2 hours of set up and 2 hours of cleaning every day, 3 times a day. These people people took amazing pride in what they do. The level of energy on a consistant bases was impressive.

I've worked in fast food restaurants and restaurants in [god forbid!] amusement parks, where part of the the closing drill was to literally(!) hose down the floor in the kitchen, hit it with nasty detergents and degreasers and go at it with scrub brushes. And then hose it down again with scalding hot water.

Clean is a mindset.

[WI-Tom]

There have been reports that children who grow up in extremely sanitary environments without exposure to germs get much more serious illnesses when adults, their immune systems don't get properly built up.
"Go play in the dirt kids".

John Welsford

Yep. I grew up eating radishes and carrots and what-not right out of the garden. Wipe the dirt off--some of it--on your T-shirt and eat. Plenty of non-food germs on a farm with horses and dairy cows, too.

That said, it sounds like the places in the movie go way beyond that.

Tom

[Nicholas Carey]

I used to enjoy morning coffee in a small shop down by the beach right next door to a family owned Chinese restaurant (they lived upstairs) and was always puzzled by the plastic five gallon pail under the gutter spout. Until I learned what "Fish Sauce" was... (A flat roof in a sunny clime where the fog comes in the evenings is a perfect place to "sun ferment" fish, often taking a year or two to attain perfection)
They were eventually fined and shut down for serving "mystery meat"
(I'm sure it was good but never ate there)

You need to get some Red Boat brand nước mắm

https://redboatfishsauce.com

It's the real and traditional deal.

And then make nước chấm, world's best dipping sauce. Got to be made up fresh though.

Vietnamese Fish sauce
Lime juice
Sugar
Small fresh red chile, minced, like birds-eye (but Fresno will do)
Fresh garlic, grated on a microplane or smashed and pureed.
A little boiling water

[sandtown]

You need to get some Red Boat brand nước mắm

https://redboatfishsauce.com r

That is the secret ingrediant in the Admiral's beef stew recipe - the nước mắm gives it a nice kick !!

[JimD]

I worked in restaurants for years. Some kitchens were very clean, others not so much. But even the best of them still had that 'industrial sized' smell to them. I rarely eat out now and make almost all my own meals.

[willmarsh3]

In our travels we stopped at a restaurant in a small town in the northern part of Virginia to eat dinner. The first place had a lot of parking spaces and few cars parked. I thought - they ought to be quick. We got in, sat down and were served water. While waiting for the wait staff to come take our order, I observed a roach making its debut on our table. We both said "ok - lets get out of here". A few minutes later we found another place - this one had a nearly full parking lot. We got in, the service was quick and the food was really good. Lesson learned - look for where the locals go.

[JayInOz]

Yep. I grew up eating radishes and carrots and what-not right out of the garden. Wipe the dirt off--some of it--on your T-shirt and eat. Plenty of non-food germs on a farm with horses and dairy cows, too.

That said, it sounds like the places in the movie go way beyond that.

Tom

Hey Tom if you eat a couple of radishes and then a handful of green beans straight out of the garden it makes you burp- and it smells really bad! That's what my friends on the school bus used to tell me anyway. Good times- tell your grandkids! JayInOz

[Tom from Rubicon]

Attachment 127836

As a lecherous person myself. How does Kat put up with you? Our BROTM has not weighed in.

[Paul Pless]

i'm remodeling her sewing room at the moment. . .

gonna try to wrap that up today actually
better come up with a new trick soon

[AlanMc]

I've only worked in two types of restaurants the type that McMike has been in and the type that you could literally eat off the kitchen floor.
Seriously at the end of service the ENTIRE kitchen, walls, floors, ceiling, and every imaginable surface was hand scrubbed and sanitized by a brigade de cuisine staff working on their hands and knees with buckets of hot soapy water and scrub brushes until it was gleaming perfection. These are places where the walk-ins are immaculate and every container is sealed, marked and dated. Bathrooms are impeccable and there is 2 hours of set up and 2 hours of cleaning every day, 3 times a day. These people people took amazing pride in what they do. The level of energy on a consistant bases was impressive.

same for me. i waited tables through school in multiple restaurants from $5/plate diners to $50/plate nice places and they would all hose the entire kitchen down after the night shift. every piece of equipment pulled out and cleaned behind, fryers filtered, walk-ins sprayed, etc. it was usually once a month they would pull all the dining floor furniture and deep clean behind all of that as well. i've also never seen a single person tamper with food or do anything unusual. one time i reached into the ice bin and a new sheet of ice came out and hit my hand. it cut me, but i wasn't bleeding or anything. manager dumped the whole bin, sent people out to buy bagged ice immediately, and cleaned that ice machine for 2 hours.

[Osborne Russell]

Europhilia. Class system sado-masochism, the bourgeois pretending to aristocracy.

A guy told me once about attending a prestigious French woodworking school. He was making a jewelry cabinet that had 12 drawers, three different sizes, and so, many backs, fronts, sides, guides and all. He got all the pieces out and stacked on his bench, numbered according to plan and sorted as to item. Next morning he comes in to start assembly, and the "master" comes along and says, "What is zis, you must hold it all in your head and in your soul!" He puts his arm flat on the bench and sweeps the whole shebang onto the floor.

I'd a kicked his frog a$$. Sweep my work onto the floor?

Same with these puto chefs. Tiny tyrants. What they need is

[mike9199]

I started to watch it once but decided to stop as I really enjoy restaurants once in while.
Better to keep couple of stomach pills in my pocket (I read info about them on canadian pharmacy online website) and enjoy the food I like, without spending hours in the kitchen cooking it. If you go one day to Asian countries you just need close your eyes an eat, otherwise you will be hungry all the time.

[CK 17]

A lot of delicate sensibilities here in the bilge. A small fraction of what we find unsettling will actually do us harm.

I worked in a banquet hall as a teen. We had 4 dining rooms that could seat 1600. Sometimes we’d have a couple of weddings going on.

no big deal, just stagger the service a bit. We’d bus the tables after dessert and dump the spoons in a pail of water. If we had time we’d run them through the dishwasher, if we didn’t we’d just stick them in the next round of desserts.

I do believe everyone got out alive.

[WszystekPoTrochu]

My wife worked in the restaurant business for a long time, and when I read Katherine’s post to her she just nodded her head and said ‘uh huh’. I guess we don’t really know how the sausage is made, do we? I will say that she always, always checks out the health inspection numbers before we sit down anywhere.

Mickey Lake

How do your inspectors operate? Around here they always announce themselves, what in my eyes kinda defeats the whole point. When I worked in a pizza place, they had a dishwasher - as required - to wash the plates and cutlery. It was broken when I got there, it was broken when I left it. They only moved clutter blocking the door to someone's car or wherever when the inspector came, to show them a shiny accessible regulated dishwasher.
They also, uh, acquired a used stainless steel kitchen cabinet from what was left from burned down a restaurant 30 miles away. And tended to sharpen knives on a nearby curb.

Other than that, my general opinion of restaurants improved after working there. Each day was started by cleaning the customer space and finished by thoroughly cleaning the kitchen. There were two directly adjacent sinks, one for cleaning food and one for cleaning everything else (sans floor rags) and the guys, half of which never paid taxes, many of which had at least one state sponsored all inclusive vacation behind them, followed the rules. Kept things clean. The sheer scale of what even a small time non-franchise pizza place cooks meant that nothing was ever at risk of spoiling.

The biggest horror I've seen was when a nearby restaurant closed down and we got to hunt for cookware. The kitchen wasn't probably even repainted since it was built during People's Republic, half of cookware blackened, the hoods turned black and oily, the terrible state of (again, 40+ years old) tables under the nice tablecloth... we got two frying pans from there that looked like they could be cleaned to usable state, both went into trash after several failed attempts to clean them. Their kitchen did not smell of anything though.

[bamamick]

They just show up, as far as I know. The place where my wife spent the last seventeen years (as CFO) was one of the largest restaurants on the northern Gulf Coast of the US, and the largest employer in the town where it's located. It's a tourist-central place, and I'd say 95% of their business comes from tourists. They always have a health department rating in the 99-100% range, and deservedly so, with this one caveat:

The kitchen is not air-conditioned. Or at least it wasn't then. And this is on the Alabama Gulf Coast. Where it's hot. And it's a kitchen. Plenty of fans and all that, but no air-conditioning, so you can draw your own conclusions.

Mickey Lake

[woodpile]

Just eat at some of the open air markets in Asia or the middle east, you'll get over it.

[C. Ross]

When judging hygiene in restaurants, weigh it against hygiene in your own kitchen.

The things we do and don’t do regularly in our own kitchens makes restaurants look pretty good.

[WszystekPoTrochu]

The kitchen is not air-conditioned. Or at least it wasn't then. And this is on the Alabama Gulf Coast. Where it's hot. And it's a kitchen. Plenty of fans and all that, but no air-conditioning, so you can draw your own conclusions.

Mickey Lake

Yeah, when temperatures outside went to almost 100F we just closed for two days. Even below that magic number the kitchen would easily heat up to 120F with all windows open, the main workbench near the oven exceeding 130. The orders on such days are close to none anyway, the heatwaves were sparse enough to just risk the regulars' ire and hope that the fridges keep something decent inside.

[sandtown]

It is not just restaurants . . .

the same food safety issues exist throughout the entire food chain.

A lot of the bad stuff happens well before the product gets to the restaurant.

[wizbang 13]

When judging hygiene in restaurants, weigh it against hygiene in your own kitchen.

The things we do and don’t do regularly in our own kitchens makes restaurants look pretty good.

I am boiling kitchen sponges while I read this.

[Katherine]

When judging hygiene in restaurants, weigh it against hygiene in your own kitchen.

The things we do and don’t do regularly in our own kitchens makes restaurants look pretty good.

This is true.