An official
kitchen evaluation begins with a rather simple action: Someone sits in the
kitchen and does nothing but observe. What do you watch for? Just use your
common sense and measure your kitchen against the out-of-control symptoms
listed.
Many
owner/managers believe that it just isn’t cool to sit and watch their kitchen
at work. Often the owners think, “My staff will think that I don’t trust them.”
During an evaluation, trust is not the issue. What would happen if the airlines
felt it wasn’t cool to evaluate pilots?
Walk around
from time to time and get close to the action. Taste some of the food being
prepared. Just the way your staff gets you the food samples tells you a lot
about how they respect their food and their sanitation level. For example, if
they simply get a kitchen utensil, load the sample onto the utensil and then
give it to you, you know that they are not as concerned about style and sanitation
than they would be if they put the sample onto a disposable or china plate (or
other container) and gave you a normal piece of metal or disposable flatware to
use. This is what evaluating is all about; you need to look at the small
details and past the obvious.
Things to
watch for in your kitchen evaluation include:
· How are the kitchen leaders sitting? Is anyone
facing the back door? Is anyone sitting close to the back door to watch what
comes in and out of the kitchen? Minding the entry and exit doors are important
to eliminate losses from stealing and to catch errors before they happen.
· Do your chefs kick the oven door closed, or
otherwise roughhouse your equipment? Kicking the door closed is a culinary sin;
it causes damage to some parts of the stove, like the gas safety, that can
require a costly repair. Is your equipment really clean?
· Does your staff sample freely from foods being
prepared? Do they eat while they are working? A professional kitchen doesn’t
permit eating while working. It is unsanitary and dangerous. Imagine eating a
sandwich while slicing meat on the slicer. A separate area in the kitchen
should be used for eating during breaks.
· Are there signs of staff smoking in the
kitchen? It’s unlawful and creates a liability.
· Does your hand sink work? Are there soap and
towels at the sink? Some caterers have all staff stop what they are doing and
wash their hands every hour on the hour. Handwashing comes with the job in the
kitchen! Even if rubber gloves are used, handwashing is a must; dirty hands are
the culprit in many food-borne illnesses.
· In the walk-in cooler, are like foods shelved
together or are there flats of strawberries here, there and over there?
Organization is crucial in any cooler storage system. Use a first-in, first-out
process.
· After a can or package has been used and put
into the garbage take it out and shake it, scrape it and look inside. Is all of
the food out of it? You may find peas still stuck at the bottom of package of
frozen peas. There may be some baked beans at the bottom of the can. When
things start moving fast in a kitchen, culinary staff sometimes overlook things
and take shortcuts.
· Take a pan of food from an order ready to go
and check to see if the food is in the same amount as requested on the order or
packing list. If the order calls for 42 chicken breasts, how many are really
going? Too many or too few, either is a problem.
· See if anyone fails to wash their knives every
time they move from one food group to another. Do the culinary staff have
thermometers in their pockets? Are they using them? Do your staff clean their
workstations as they go?
· Try to determine whether there is fear of
asking questions in your kitchen.
· Moving fast in a kitchen is a good thing, but
it also can signal that the timing is not correct. A quality kitchen makes
mistakes. The question is how many and when are they caught and corrected.
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