Should you or should you not look behind the restaurant kitchen doors
You are celebrating your promotion at work at your favorite restaurant and you have ordered a tasty, locally grown organic meal. You indulge completely to savor your food, while feeling good that your life appears to be just perfect. What could be better?
Well, as a starter: the conditions in which your food is prepared. Food with attitude is okay, but food with hygiene is rather more important. Ever wondered whether or not the food, we tend to treat ourselves with at restaurants, is prepared maintain the standard conditions of cleanliness and hygiene? Ever thought of having a sneak peek into the kitchen of your favorite restaurant and say Hi to the chefs? Maybe you should, once in a while.
Good food is definitely good vibes until you get sick because of the low standard of cleanliness and hygiene at restaurants and eateries. Catching food infections at a restaurant is the worst nightmares of their guests, more commonly evident in children. Customers would obviously wish to dine in a restaurant that serves hygienic food and focuses on cleanliness. The point of concern here now is how do we decide which of the restaurant serves hygienic food and which of them do not maintain the standard hygiene conditions.
As a usual ideology, it is assumed that the high standard five start restaurants serve the most hygienic food and maintain high standard cleanliness. Provided the fact that the entire staff of such a restaurant is well qualified and considerably trained, justifies such an image of the restaurant in people’s minds. People usually prefer the high standard and obviously expensive restaurants over the shabby, précised or pinpoint restaurants with a moderate yet considerable ambience and quality services. This preferentiality is due to the assumption of the fact that the more you pay, the higher quality of services you avail and thus the food served must be hygienic enough. The actual fact might be that you end up paying for the ambience and services provided more than over the food served. Must give this a thought!
Taking the quality of food served and hygiene maintained into consideration, there is always a chance that due to such high maintenance of the 5-star restaurants, they have an access to well-furnished technology as well. There are always freezers which help them store food for longer period of time. In fact, the food served in all the franchises of large and renowned brands, have a supply of their raw materials, always in a frozen form. Nobody would actually want to eat something that is in the refrigerator of the house for a day or two, but readily enjoy such meals in the restaurants.
Street foods, highly enjoyed and populous among the young, is considered to be oily and unhygienic by many. Several videos and pictures of the unhygienic conditions in which street food is prepared are timely circulated over the social media. People here tend to be very aware and concerned about the hygiene maintained and threaten the owners of small stalls by recording their videos and posting over the social media negative review or feedback.
However, the fact that a considerable proportion of the entire population within a metropolitan city relies upon the street food cannot be taken for granted. What else could make the best example, but the Vada Pav in Mumbai is a staple diet for everyone, be it employees, strugglers or anyone as such. Do people here talk about hygiene? Obviously not! Is your health adversely effected by Vada Pav? Obviously not! It is not all about the quality of services provided, the fact that these street foods are freshly prepared everyday and you can actually witness the food being prepared and immediately served is what makes it safe.
The fact to thus understand is that the points to consider while choosing which restaurant to dine in, shouldn’t just the ambience or the quality of service provided but the quality of food, the raw materials used, the steps taken by the cooks and serving staff to maintain hygiene and of course the freshness of the food served. You cannot form a general opinion regarding the hygiene conditions of restaurants based upon the hierarchy of restaurants. The places like food stalls can serve hygienic food as well. The high standard restaurants and at times fail to do so as well and vice versa. You, as a consumer need to wisely choose among all these restaurants. Make sure that you dine to be healthy and fine.
