Lush Life | The health (code) of your local bar
It has become a print-worthy pastime to read the ratings from the Department of Health for our local restaurants. In typical modern-day fashion, no one really chats about the perfect scores. They fall off the conversation map to make way for the places that score less than perfect. We love it when someone fails or, better yet, gets shut down.
The truth is, the bar at your favorite restaurant is more likely to violate the health code than the kitchen. In fact, I’ve seen, first hand, scores drop an entire letter grade just because of what is going on in the bar. We don’t often consider the sanitation efforts that a bar needs to take, but we should.
If there is one rule that bars forget or fail to acknowledge altogether it is the fact that ice is food. That’s right. The ice in the bin is served to be consumed. That makes it food for sale. Using glasses, shaker tins or, even worse, your hands to scoop ice into a glass is a violation. Likewise, storing a proper ice scoop in the ice full-time is a violation.
Consider cross-contamination. A bartender wipes down the counter after someone leaves. Then, they grab a glass to make a drink. Use the glass to scoop the ice. Germs and, possibly, bacteria from the wiped counter to their hands to the glass to the ice. Sure this is a stretch, but it is what the health department considers as unsafe.
Even more overlooked is the cleanliness of the ice bin itself. How many times do those get cleaned? If you look around the edges, the story will be told. Black fungus/dirt/gunk forms around the corners and creases of an ill-kept ice bin. If you get a chance to check out the drain at the bottom of an ice bin, you may be shocked at what you see.
By most practices, fresh ice goes right on top of the ice from the day before. Some places will clean the ice bins at the end of the night, but even if it is on the side work list, this gets overlooked a lot.
The same principles hold true for that fruit tray you see waiting to garnish the drinks. There should be a set of tongs dedicated to the fruit in an approved storage container. How many bars around town just use their hands to grab the fruit?
Of course the tongs exist. I’ve worked in places that have them and break them out when DHEC walks in only to store them away again after they leave. This is as much of an industry standard as hair nets and latex gloves. Those things only come out during the inspections.
When is the last time you heard someone order a White Russian? The refrigeration is another area of concern for most inspectors. The equipment behind the bar takes a back seat to the equipment in the kitchen.
The temperature in the reach-in coolers is seldom monitored or checked. Thermometers are required in these coolers, but they get shoved to the back in the fury of bottles and storage containers. The milk, which is not used that much, could be more on the yogurt side of life. Be careful ordering milk-based drinks at the more questionable watering holes.
Just as in milk, whipped cream and juice can be rancid from poor refrigeration. If it tastes funny, send it back. I do not like to say that a lot, but, in this case, err on the side of safety.
We all love a clean bar. That means there should be some bar mops or white towels with some type of spray cleaner behind the bar. The towels should be white so that the wear on them is visible. Dark-colored towels do not tell their story well enough.
The towels and cleaning solution are a good practice. Where you leave them is a bad practice. Bar mops left on the fruit trays, bottle tops, ice bin or anything else close to being used to prepare a drink is not a good sign.
DHEC asks for sanitation buckets behind the bar with cleaning solution in them. While not all places use these on a daily basis, that does not mean that the bar towels should be in plain sight and hanging out on the fruit tray.
There are a bevy of pet peeves behind the bar that contribute to poor sanitation. Everything from the bartender eating behind the bar to the glass washer not working at the right temperature contribute to the overall sanitation score of a bar. While most of the evidence is buried in the overall score of the restaurant, you should be on the look out for telltale signs that the bar was the culprit.
If owners, general managers and chefs are smart, they will get the bar in sanitary shape alongside the kitchen. As always, if you see violations in sanitation you can report such sightings directly to DHEC through their website.
This is not to say that we should be in a habit of ruining our night out by policing the sanitation practices of bars, but to say that we all have a duty to watch out for one another. You can just as easily get a food-borne illness from the bar as you can the kitchen.
Drink safely.
This story was originally published April 21, 2015 at 12:00 PM with the headline "Lush Life | The health (code) of your local bar."