Proper Cleaning For the Restaurant Industry In St. Louis, Missouri

Restaurants are tasked with the chore of keeping their place of business clean and hygienic for the health and safety of their employees and patrons. Every aspect of your facility must be cleaned properly to #1 meet health standards and for safe preparation of food for customers.

Restaurant managers must carefully inspect kitchen areas, dining areas, and restrooms to make sure the health of your restaurant is up to quality standards. How do you know what those standards are? The NSF, which is the public health and safety organization and the FDA, U.S. Food and Drug Administration have all the information you would need online. Make sure your establishment meets all local government guidelines for food safety. Now that we got that out of the way, what should you do for these areas of your restaurant? Kitchen? Dining Area, Floors, and Restrooms?

The Kitchen Area

The kitchen is one of the most important areas of your business. This area is exposed to a variety of contaminants through your cooks, servers, bussers, and distributors bringing food into the restaurant. Because these people have full access to the food and surfaces that you prepare food on, they can easily contaminate surfaces. Uncooked food also poses a health risk if surfaces are not cleaned sufficiently throughout your workday and at the end of each day.

What type of cleaning should I do?

Your workers should sanitize and disinfect surfaces that have come into contact with food and kitchen equipment. Besides your daily cleaning, you should also hire in a commercial cleaner from the St. Louis area like Grimebusters, Inc that can completely clean your restaurant from top to bottom. At the end of each day make sure you are properly storing your equipment so they can dry properly. Items like cutting boards, blenders, grills, and countertops should be disinfected and dried.

The Dining Area

One of the ways to impress your patrons is to keep your dining area very clean and neatly arranged. The dining area is one of the first places they see. Many patrons decide to leave a restaurant if the dining area looks dirty or dingy. This is why all your tables should be sanitized and disinfected each day. Properly cleaning the dining area will increase the visual appeal.

Your staff should clean any surface that they come into contact with like bar tops, table tops, and chairs. Surface cleaning these items should be done with a clean towel that has not been used on any other surfaces. Make sure your staff also lightly clean the condiment bottles. These come into contact with hundreds of people each week and can easily spread germs.

The Floors

Dirty floors are another turn off for your customers. The last thing they really want to see is a dirty, worn carpet at they walk into your establishment. Unsightly floors are another reasons patrons will leave your restaurant and not return. Regularly deep clean your carpets through a commercial cleaning company. The advantage they have is their truck mounted steam cleaning systems get deep into the fibers of the carpeting and clean and extract the dirt from the carpet and the pad underneath. If you see a customer spill something on the carpet, don’t worry, but also don’t let it sit there. Get a clean towel and blot it clean. Don’t scrub it! That will work the stain further into the carpet fibers.

Restrooms

There is nothing more disgusting than eating at a restaurant and then going to the restroom to find a stinky, unclean environment that you don’t even want to use. This is a patron’s worst nightmare! A dirty, unkempt bathroom will very easily turn customers off and destroy your reputation. If you have high traffic to certain bathrooms, make sure you are cleaning them more than once a day. Most bathrooms need to be cleaned 2-4 times per day depending on the amount of traffic.

Make sure you clean everything here! Floors, walls, sinks, toilets, urinals, handles, mirrors, and more. Every surface in your bathroom can be dirty. This is a common area that has many things overlooked when cleaning. We tend to clean the most obvious surfaces like toilets, sinks and floors. Don’t stop there! Make sure your employees are wiping down soap dispensers, sink faucets, paper towel dispensers, door handles and all of the regular surfaces.