PRLA Restaurant & Lodging Matters Spring 2020

Spring 2020  •  PENNSYLVANIA RESTAURANT & LODGING matters  • 13 Sanitation Social distancing and crowded dining rooms are like placing two north poles of a magnet near each other. You’ll have to re-examine every aspect of your operation before the dining room reopens. CEO Todd Graves from Raising Cane’s said he is taking out half of the tables and putting X’s on the floor to designate where customers should stand to maximize social distancing. Expect your customers to return to your restaurant slowly and know that many of them will now be germophobes. QSR operators are talking about reinstating a dining room attendant to clean and bus tables. Buffet operators will have employees don masks and gloves to dish out food, similar to the old cafeteria operations. Cost-saving tools that were put in place years ago also must be re-examined. For instance, how safe are the hand blowers in the bathrooms, or the order kiosks on the tables? How clean are the trays in a QSR restaurant, or the self-serve ketchup and mustard dispensers? How about the freestyle soda machines, how often will they be cleaned? What about the laminated menus? They already looked grimy.