Germophobes Beware: Your Favorite Restaurant Is Trying To Kill You

Health Inspectors Are Good, But........

I'm kind of a clean freak. I admit it and I come by it honestly. My mother was the Queen of Clean. Germs didn't stand a chance anywhere in my mother's house. She dusted, vacuumed, scrubbed, and scoured from dawn 'til dusk. She entombed everything in plastic and sanitized each and every surface she encountered. There was never a speck of dust on a shelf or a knickknack, never a streak on a window or mirror, and nary a grease or water spot anywhere in the kitchen. Never mind the old “five second rule”: my mother's floors were so clean that if you ever dropped anything on them you could just sit down with a knife and fork and eat it where it lay. I'm not sure but I think stocks in Lysol and Clorox fell dramatically the day she died. I'm not quite that OCD, but the acorn didn't fall far from the tree. So how I wound up involved in food service is a mystery to me. Like it or not, restaurants are nasty, dirty places.

You see, cooking is not a clean process. There's lots of dirt, grease, blood and other things you'd probably rather not think about involved in the transformation of raw foodstuffs into the tasty morsels you ingest. Now I'm not saying the food you're being served in restaurants is nasty, dirty, or in any way unsafe. That's why we have health inspectors and why in most states you'll see letter or number grades posted in eating establishments to reassure you that local health departments are on the job. Trust me, those of us who have inhabited commercial kitchens over the years come to cringe and cower when we see health inspectors come through the door because we know they're going to do their damnedest to find something wrong. And to your benefit they often do and they hold us accountable for fixing it.

Are the people preparing your food practicing safe techniques? Are they wearing gloves? Are their heads covered to prevent hair from falling into your salad? Did you know that most jurisdictions even regulate how kitchen employees drink? Yep. Food workers have to drink from lidded containers with a straw and said containers have to be kept away from food prep areas. Why? To prevent the possibility of your food being contaminated by droplets of employee saliva. And an establishment's lower number or letter grade might not be the result of a direct food preparation issue. I got dinged by an inspector once because somebody had inexplicably wrapped a small piece of duct tape around the faucet at a handwash sink. Duct tape does not make for a smooth, easily cleanable surface and hence can't be used in a restaurant kitchen.

Yep, health inspectors are good. But for all the myriad things they inspect for, there are a number of things they overlook. And those are the things that are gonna getcha if you're a dedicated germophobe.

You know what the Number One Dirtiest Thing In A Restaurant is? Study after study have shown it to be the menu. Think about it. Or don't, if you prefer. How many filthy, dirty, grimy, nasty hands have handled that menu you're holding? Hands that have done things and been places you really don't want to consider just before eating. Sure, the signs say employees are required to wash their hands after using the bathroom, but patrons? Not so much. What about the dog groomer or the sanitation worker who “forgot” to wash their hands when they left work? And there's always some cute little toddler or infant who has chewed on or otherwise spread snot all over the entire surface you're now touching. Was Typhoid Mary the last person to order from your menu? The Journal of Medical Virology reports that cold and flu viruses can survive for eighteen hours on hard surfaces. Has that menu been dropped on the floor? Probably. And the places those menus are often stored aren't exactly NASA clean rooms, you know? Studies have shown you have a better chance with the restaurant's toilet seats than with the menus. At least people clean the toilets from time to time. Most eateries only give the hard cover or plastic menus a cursory wipe down as an afterthought if they bother to do it at all. And paper menus obviously never get wiped down. Good Morning America once sent an investigative team out to swab items on tables at a dozen restaurants and they found that menus averaged around 185,000 bacteria. So you don't want the menus touching your plates or silverware if you can help it and washing or sanitizing your hands after handling them is probably a good idea.

Next up on the Wheel of Sanitary Misfortune are condiment containers, especially salt and pepper shakers. C'mon, you've picked up a sticky salt shaker or two, haven't you? Ever wonder what it's sticky with? Probably better that you don't know. Sometimes if you point it out to your server, he or she might replace it with a less sticky one or at least wipe down the offending vessel with a nominally clean cloth. Granted, menus have been found to be sixteen times germier than salt and pepper shakers simply because everybody looks at menus while not everybody uses salt and pepper, but still...... Cleaning condiment containers is supposed to be a part of side work duties in most restaurants, but don't bet your health on it. Take matters into your own hands – so to speak – and use some sort of handi-wipe or sanitizer on those shakers and squeeze bottles before you transfer somebody else's nastiness to your fries.

If you get up from the table to go to the bathroom or something, don't drop your napkin onto the seat of your chair. Researchers at New York University Microbiology Department ran tests and found that seventy percent of restaurant chair seats harbored seventeen different varieties of bacteria including strains of good ol' E. coli. Nothing like wiping your mouth with germs from a stranger's butt, right?

Let's talk about those bathrooms for a minute. Health inspectors check restaurant rest rooms for overall condition and for obvious signs of neglect. But they don't stand in there and watch to make sure people wash their hands before touching the doorknob. So let's say the six uncouth heathens who used the bathroom before you all decided to say, “Oh hell. My hands are clean enough” after they did whatever they did and they exited without washing, thus depositing their germ-laden deposits on the door handle. Along comes you. You wash your hands, of course, and then you grab the handle and........you might as well not have bothered. Here's what the people who advise all us clean freaks recommend: after you've washed up and dried your hands, grab a clean paper towel and use it to open the door. Most rest rooms have a waste receptacle near the door. Toss in the towel after you've opened the door. As my wife was looking over my shoulder just now, she reminded me of a few places that have automatic kick plates that allow you open the door without touching the handle. Let's hope those catch on.

Oh, and while we're in the bathroom, have you ever thought about what you're touching when you touch the faucet handles or the soap dispenser? Ye-e-a-a-h-h-h, so make sure you wash your hands really thoroughly with the nice clean soap that came out of that nasty dispenser that I guarantee nobody ever thought to clean and sanitize when they cleaned the rest of the bathroom.

And ladies, for goodness sake don't set your purse on the bathroom floor. Most public toilets don't have lids and those that do seldom have them used. So everything that gets flushed gets partially aerosolized and deposited on the floor around the toilet. And then you carry your purse back to the dining room and maybe set it on the table while you look for something? Just. Don't.

One more item tops the list of things to avoid in most restaurants: lemon wedges. According to numerous studies, fifty to seventy percent of the lemon wedges perched on the rims of restaurant glasses contain disease-causing microbes including E. coli and other fecal bacteria. Why? For one thing, nobody washes the lemons before they're cut. There's this naïve assumption that they come into the restaurant all nice and squeaky clean. Wrong-o! They come right out the box that came right out the groves after passing through the hands of pickers and sorters who, shall we say, might be somewhat lax about the whole handwashing after using the bathroom thing? So here comes your prep person, who also may or may not have fingers you want to stick in your mouth, and they start whacking away at those lemons. The cut wedges mound up in a container and the germs just have a party getting to know one another before they're rubbed around the rim of your glass or squeezed into your beverage.

“But wait,” you say. “Aren't lemons acidic and won't that acid kill all the germs?” Not really. According to food science expert John Floros, head of the Department of Food Science at Penn State University, acidic lemon juice is unfavorable to the growth of most microbes, but it doesn’t kill them directly. And Clemson University food scientists who studied drink garnishes found that dry lemons pick up nasty bacteria thirty percent of the time. That figure rises to one hundred percent when the lemons are wet.

And speaking of the rims of those glasses, if your server hands you a glass the rim of which they have touched with their hands or fingers, ask for two things: a new glass and a manager. Servers are supposed to be trained better than that. I've nailed more than one server on this, both as a consultant and as a customer. “The top of the glass is the customer's,” I tell them. “The bottom of the glass is yours.” The rims of glasses were found the be the sixth most germy restaurant spot in the aforementioned New York University Microbiology Department research project.

Okay. Now that I've convinced you that everything in your favorite restaurant is out to kill you, go on out and enjoy dinner somewhere. Seriously. You can't live in a bubble and you can't walk around in a hazmat suit. Germs are everywhere and you can't completely avoid them. And you know what? You don't want to. Exposure to some germs helps develop a healthy immune system. But that doesn't necessarily mean you have to invite them to dine with you. They say “knowledge is power” and “forewarned is forearmed” and all that stuff, so I've tried to impart just a little forewarning and a bit of knowledge here when it comes to dining in a restaurant. What you do with it is up to you.