Practicing proper hygiene in the kitchen isn’t just a matter of the lack of respect—it’s also a question of health. If you’re serving your customers undercooked, sloppily prepared food with God knows what detritus mixed in among the ingredients of questionable freshness, you might make someone seriously sick while also severely damaging the business’ reputation.

And if you’re making your customers fall ill that can have major repercussions for the future of your career in the food service industry. It means that you can lose your job. You’re also leaving yourself open to lawsuits while your place of work can be shut down for not following hygiene protocols.

Not only that, serving substandard dishes is an indication that the chef lacks empathy for their customers, they may be too lazy or burned out to enforce decent standards, or there are other serious issues at play in the background. You can easily tell if a chef has fallen out of love with their job or is overworked to hell and back: you’ll see it when the server brings their dish to your table, and you’ll taste it in that first yucky mouthful.

Improperly storing ingredients is a major problem in some kitchens. This comes down to either a lack of training, a lack of managerial oversight, or a lack of care about the consequences of one’s actions. If food is stored sloppily, you can end up with pathogens growing in it or you might end up with cross-contamination.

Bacteria, fungi, viruses, and various microorganisms thrive in some food items more than in others. For example, some of the most fertile breeding grounds for pathogens include raw eggs, raw chicken, raw flour, seafood, and unpasteurized milk. As a rule of thumb, ingredients that have a low acid and a high moisture content tend to go off very quickly.

On the flip side, food items with high acidity and low moisture content can be left out for longer. So it’s not a disaster if you leave out lemons, jam, pickles, rice cakes, and crackers for a longer bit of time. However, the opposite is true for, say, raw shrimp, which needs to be utilized ASAP.

A good chef will know how quickly each ingredient needs to be prepared and how to store them properly so there’s no danger to the customer. Broadly speaking, the so-called danger zone for pathogen growth is between 4 to 60 degrees Celsius (that’s 40 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit). 

Every proper restaurant should have a hygiene checklist for both the kitchen staff and the front-of-house employees so that everyone knows what needs to be cleaned and when. The Canadian Institute of Food Safety suggests cleaning and sanitizing splattered kitchen walls, food prep areas, and sinks every single day. Kitchen staff should also sweep and mop the floors, walk-in fridges, and storage areas daily, too, as well as clean the inside and outside of garbage cans.

Not only that, but wash rags, towels, aprons, and uniforms should be washed daily. Garbage has to be disposed of every day, too. And staff should take the time to manually clean grills, fryers, beverage machines, coffee makers, microwaves, and toasters. That’s a lot of work! But the entire point of it is to maintain high standards and ensure top-quality food.

Meanwhile, walk-in fridges and freezers ought to be sanitized once a week. Other weekly restaurant kitchen tasks include manually cleaning the floor drains, the ovens, the deep fryer, and the floor mats. Meanwhile, once a month, the kitchen staff should manually clean the walls and the ceiling, the area behind the hotline, and the vent hoods. They can also use this opportunity to empty the grease traps.