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Drat! It's tough to keep fine dining restaurants clean

Standalone, expensive restaurants in Mumbai struggle to maintain international standards of hygiene.

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On the opening night of a fancy restaurant in Pali Naka in Bandra last December, media professional Sharon John (name changed) tagged along with a food writer who wanted to review it for a newspaper. At the end of a satisfying meal, John spotted something scurrying away into a corner. “It was a rat,” she explains.

Sam Cherian, a 29-year-old banking professional, had a similar “gross” experience at a joint popular for its subs. Just as he was heading out, he spied a cockroach making itself quite at home amongst the cut vegetables.

So, in this infamously crowded city, are standalone restaurants struggling with hygiene?

A recent report said the food and drug administration had issued ‘improvement notices’ to over 200 of the 1,158 eateries it inspected between April 2012 and March 2013. The popular Barbeque Nation was served one, too. It sounds alarm bells as Mumbaikars, according to a recent survey by the National Restaurant Association of India, eat out at least twice a week.

It’s a touchy subject for most, but several well-known chefs point out that good hygiene calls for good planning, bigger kitchen spaces and a well-trained staff. Mumbai, it turns out, fails all three tests.

Several chefs who have worked abroad, where rules on hygiene are more stringent, admit that at first, they balked at poor hygiene practices at hip restaurants in the city.

Who took my space?
A chef who worked for a prestigious chain of five-star hotels recalls an instance a few years ago when the head chef retrieved a piece of salmon from the dustbin when an unexpected order for smoked salmon came. “Besides, meat was not kept separately [from the vegetables] in a freezer. So, the chef had to discard it before a routine checkup.” Today, he chuckles at the memory, claiming that “it happens everywhere”.

He also alleges that there’s little that is impromptu about food inspections. The more established eateries, especially five-star restaurants, reportedly receive a tip-off a week in advance.

The executive chef of a well-known restaurant in Bandra complains that most city eateries have small preparation and receiving areas. “In Mumbai, 40-60% of the restaurant is dedicated to dining area to increase turnover and only 20% is reserved for the kitchen. So, each person gets only about 2sqft to work comfortably. I have worked in hotels abroad where the working space is small, but you also have a shorter menu with only about 20-25
items. Here, you have to make around 50-100 items.”

With space constraints playing on everybody’s mind, food hygiene, especially during rush hours, is easily the first to go out of the window.

Disinfecting one’s workstation with chlorine after winding up for the day comes naturally to staff members elsewhere in the world. But it’s anybody’s guess what it must be like in eateries here.

“One must run a litmus paper over the workstation to ensure that it has been evenly chlorinated,” explains the executive chef.

Hands off
Bandra may have the city’s best eateries, but the massive slums there make it a less than ideal location, hygiene-wise.

Chef Richard, executive chef at Pali Bhavan, points out that all Bandra-based outlets are perhaps struggling with rodents. “But, we fumigate the restaurant every two weeks. The owner imported ultrasound machines from abroad to tackle this problem,” he explains.

“Also, the chef may take all precautions while cooking, but what happens when fishmonger bring fish stuffed with ice and kept in dirty bags on their cycles? The very first phase of the entire procedure is not hygienic.”

And then, there is that matter of untrained staff members. More than 70% of chefs in standalone restaurants and bakeries have no formal training and work their way up, explains Cordeiro D’Souza Demetrius, the executive chef of soon-to-be-opened restaurant Tea Trails. D’Souza has worked on a cruise liner that touched ports in the US, where rules were so strict that one had to “scrape dirt off from under the table with a toothpick”.

Chef Richard agrees that at the time of joining, staff members have “zero idea” about hygiene, little knowledge about chemicals like cleaning agents and the importance of basic rules like wearing gloves while handling food items. “They need to be trained to carry out day-to-day operations in a hygienic way.”

Arpana Gvalani, owner of Bandra-based burger joint Gostana, rates hygiene, pollution, pest control and lack of space as the main issues that a restaurateur in Mumbai has to grapple with. However, she points out that people are more aware today about the food being served to them. “Standards are getting better since if someone does not like a restaurant, s/he will out it up on Facebook, Burrp or Twitter. So, mid-level restaurants onwards, I see a definite improvement.”

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