Tag: sanitary
Chefs Reveal Their Secrets

Chefs Reveal Their Secrets

By Daniel Neman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (TNS)

More than half of all chefs say they have found customers making out — at least making out, if you catch my drift — in their restaurant restrooms.

This fact, which fascinates me far more than it really should, comes to us courtesy of the Food Network magazine. In a 2009 story that has recently resurfaced again on the Internet, the magazine surveyed about 100 chefs across the country and came up with a list of 25 things chefs never tell you.

For one, chefs can be picky eaters. Only 15 percent of the ones surveyed say they will eat absolutely anything. The foods they said most frequently that they will not eat are liver, sea urchin, and — this is a surprise, probably because I like them both — eggplant and oysters.

On the other hand, the chefs don’t like it when their customers are picky. You know how some people claim to be allergic to items when they aren’t really allergic to them? Chefs hate that (though it is unexplained how they can distinguish fake allergies from real ones).

And they like their customers to follow their own rules. If you’re a vegetarian, don’t tell them “a little chicken stock is OK.”

One trend made unappetizingly clear from the survey is that restaurant kitchens are less sanitary than we, the dining public, may like to think.

Although 85 percent of the chefs rated their kitchens as very clean (at least an 8 on a scale from 1 to 10), it should come as no particular surprise that 75 percent of them also reported having seen roaches. Roaches go where there is food and water. Restaurants have food and water and kitchen doors that are open much of the time. Restaurants are going to get roaches; the trick lies in getting rid of them as quickly as possible.

Of more concern is the revelation that 25 percent of the chefs say they’ve served food that they had dropped on the floor, and three of them say they have taken uneaten bread out of one bread basket and sent it out to other customers in another bread basket. Health inspectors tend to look at both of these practices with understandable consternation.

Also alarming, at least for vegetarians, is that a minority of the chefs admitted to using meat products in the dishes they claim are vegetarian. About 15 percent of those surveyed said they do that.

Worst of all are the 13 percent of chefs surveyed who said they have seen cooks do terrible things to customers’ food. After one customer sent his steak back twice, a chef reported that “someone” (ahem) ran it through the dishwasher and then sent it back out to him.

Fifteen years ago, chef-turned-writer-turned-celebrity Anthony Bourdain revealed that he never orders fish on a Monday because it is usually several days old. “Several” of the chefs — there is no telling how many that is — agreed, saying they do not get fresh deliveries on Sundays.

Some of the 25 things chefs don’t tell you they don’t have to tell you because you have probably figured them out for yourself.

More than 75 percent, for instance, say they get ideas from other restaurant menus (as the publication puts it, “there’s a reason so many restaurants serve molten chocolate cake”).

You have also probably realized that waiters are told to try to sell you on certain dishes (95 percent of the chefs say they tell the wait staff to do that), and it certainly cannot be a surprise that restaurants typically charge 2 1/2 times what a bottle of wine would cost at a retail store.

Nearly 60 percent of the responding chefs say they would like to have their own cooking show — a bigger surprise is that more than 40 percent claim they don’t — and they hate working on New Year’s Eve more than any other holiday. Valentine’s Day is a close second, though 54 percent acknowledged they like it when couples get engaged in their restaurant.

Half of the chefs say they come into work when they’re sick — remember, they’re preparing food, or are at least around food when it is prepared — and many stay through their inevitable injuries. Nearly every surveyed chef said he has been injured in some way, with several missing fingers or parts of fingers.

For this dangerous and hard work — most of them work 60 to 80 hours a week, including holidays — 65 percent of them reported making less than $75,000 a year. When they go out to dinner, they typically leave about a 20 percent tip, unless they feel the service has been inadequate.

But what about when they go to a restaurant that has no tipping? What about fast food? Where do the chefs go most often when they want something fast and bad for them?

Survey says: Wendy’s.

©2015 St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Choo Yut Shing via Flickr

 

Russia Dairy Plant Closed After Workers’ Milk Bath

Russia Dairy Plant Closed After Workers’ Milk Bath

By Sergei L. Loiko, Los Angeles Times

MOSCOW — A Siberian dairy plant was temporarily closed Friday after its workers had been found bathing in milk, a Russian consumer oversight agency reported.

Trade House Cheeses, a dairy producer in Omsk, about 1,600 miles east of Moscow, was closed for 90 days by regional authorities for an urgent inspection after complaints resulting from photographs and a video posted by one of its employees on a Russian social network.

In the photographs and video clips posted on New Year’s Eve by worker Artyom Romanov, a group of undressed employees relaxes in a container of milk as part of their New Year celebration. While still partly undressed, they then demonstrated cheese making in a clownish manner.

“But in reality our work is very boring.)))))” Romanov wrote in a caption accompanying the images.

“In a checkup we found the container where the workers were bathing and the bowls in which they were making cheese and a mass of other violations of sanitary-epidemic norms,” Marina Boyko, deputy chief of the Omsk region’s sanitary inspection agency, said in an interview with Lifenews, an online publication.

After the video appeared on NTV, a federal television network, many residents of Omsk refused to buy products made at the plant, an NTV report said this week.

“The production and service facilities are in an unsatisfactory sanitary-technical condition,” the statement read. “Conditions for personal hygiene are lacking.”

The appalling conditions and outrageous practices at this Omsk plant are quite a common occurrence these days in Russia as sanitary oversight has become virtually nonexistent, said Dmitry Yanin, a Russian senior consumer service expert.

“For five years Russia has been languishing in a so-called experiment of practically exercising no control over consumer production after a law was introduced limiting inspections of such facilities to only once every three years,” said Yanin, board chairman of the Russian Confederation of Consumer Societies, a Moscow-based group.

“What happened in this dairy plant in Omsk is of course a case of sheer idiocy, but nowadays there is nothing to prevent such idiots from indulging in similar outrages or routinely violating production and sanitary conditions elsewhere in the country.”

The plant in question could be closed for a thorough inspection five days after a prosecutor’s approval, Yanin said. “Which in many cases gives violators ample time to correct their problems before an inspection only to resort to malpractices again once the checkup is over.”

The average salary of a sanitary inspector is equal to $500 a month, but instead of raising that, the state decided to move in to prevent the inspector from taking bribes by in effect seriously curbing the inspector’s ability to control production norms and practices. More often than not, these practices lead to dire consequences, especially in food production and catering services resulting in thousands of cases every year, Yanin said.

In the western city of Kaliningrad 74 cases of acute food poisoning were registered this week resulting from eating shawarma (meat kebab) at a local cafeteria, Rospotrebnadzor Kaliningrad branch reported on its website.

52 of the cases were hospitalized in a regional infectious diseases clinic, Forty-seven of them were diagnosed with salmonellosis, the report said. The facility in question was closed for inspection.

“But for the video appearing on a social net and but for over 70 people poisoned from eating some horrible stuff, we would have never known about the risks of using these facilities’ products,” expert Yanin said. “The entire sphere of food production is now completely out of the state’s control, which means that none of us are safe when we buy food in Russia these days.”

AP Photo/Carrie Antlfinger