Spotting the Red Flags
How to decide where not to eat!
The front – nice façade, welcoming waitress and everybody’s happy to step into the air-con dining room, immaculately clean and, if he’s got time often the chef himself appears, all affability. The minimalist menu, chic décor and the tasty food all indicate a well-run restaurant. Ticks all the boxes, right?
The back – once a garden, now a wasteland of tall unkempt grasses, where up to half a dozen staff hang about smoking. Work? Not if they can help it. Talk is interrupted by hawking, spitting and coughing. Flimsy staff toilets – staff go in and out, nobody uses the washbasins just outside. The kitchen belts out smoke at times along with burnt fish smells, and there’s always the aroma of very used cooking oil – sometimes a van comes and collects the gunk. Not often.
Anyone who witnesses the sight from the back knows it can’t be such a great place, after all. But you can’t see that, not from the front. It’s only the neighbour who lives next door who catches the nightly garden scenes. It’s the friend of the neighbour who got sick so badly that he and his son had to check in immediately after their dinner for an overnight stay at the hospital. Back to the neighbour: “The awfulness of the place, the noise made by the staff, the stench – we regularly think about moving.” He pauses. “We’re just glad that we don’t actually eat there.” The restaurant, in Bangkok, flies under many radar, while remaining entirely popular – “Everyone goes there,” says the neighbour, “all kinds of diners. It’s a trusted place – looks great on Instagram.”
So, unless you’re living next door to a restaurant like this, can you actually see the red flags? It’s pretty difficult at times and you need to train yourself to be a kind of culinary version of Sherlock Holmes. Here are a few warning signs to be on the look-out for.
Firstly, check out the approach to the restaurant. Let’s illustrate this with an extreme example. If it’s located down a filthy lane awash with litter and cigarette butts, it’s probably going to be hard to clean in the first place. And how near is it to open drains? Is the restaurant in need of a coat of paint? Is it falling apart, the light above the door, flickering ominously? Are we in B-movie territory? Sometimes the hygiene aspects are simply lined up waiting for you to gawp in disbelief. I once saw a dead Alsatian outside a restaurant – it didn’t seem to worry the cook or the diners. Sometimes there really is the equivalent of a red flag, and it’s a giant one and hoisted right up for all to see.
So you’ve used your eyes to look. But how about your nose? Detect what smells are reaching you. Smells can be layered. What’s beneath that smell of fresh coffee or tempting home cooking? Perhaps something slightly off. Rancid, perhaps? It could be anything, but ask yourself what you can detect. The same once you’re inside. Keep on using your nose.
When the wait staff come up to you, check them out – and no, not for potential good looks. Do they look clean? And what about their professionalism? Okay, so you’ve chosen a casual kind of restaurant, but not casual in every way. If you think they couldn’t give a damn apart from collecting their pay cheque, it’s time to be off.
Check out the kitchens next. Many restaurants in Thailand have kitchens that are right out on the street. That isn’t necessarily a food risk. That’s one of the ways that things are done here and the main reason is that guests can see the level of cleanliness and can watch the cook making the dishes. You may have a chance to see the kitchen as you walk through to the toilets. A glimpse will tell you lots, basically if it’s clean or not. It’s a cliché but some kitchens really are gleaming. Staff spend hours cleaning them. It’s not always the case – and you may see it.
Next, go and visit the toilets. The way the toilet is kept will tell you a lot about the restaurant. If there’s no soap for example, or only a solitary hand towel for all to share, or yes, if it looks dirty, smells dirty, and so on, then you should think of eating elsewhere. But there’s another reason for visiting the little room. It’s all very well to talk about restaurant hygiene, but what about your own personal hygiene? You need to wash your hands before you eat, right? (Research shows that in US schools where children were made to wash their hands before meals, gastroenteritis was down by 75% compared to those schools which had no hand-washing policy.)
And you may need to in any case after you’ve looked at the menu. And by look at, we mean just that. We don’t mean ‘read’. That’s later. How clean is the menu? How well-treated is it? If it looks old and is covered in filth might that not mean that the restaurant management are on the apathetic side? Menus, by the way, are pretty much the most germ laden items on the table top, with a distant second being the pepper shaker. Good Morning America sent a team of scientists to do a germ-count in a dozen restaurants and found menus had an average of 185,000 bacteria - yuck! And if staff don’t care about the menu, do you think they care about the state of the kitchen?
Restaurant critics will tell you to actually read the menu next and spot the spelling mistakes – a sure sign that the restaurant isn’t perhaps too professional. However, this being Thailand, English is a second language, so the menu may be full of mistakes and it won’t mean a thing. Finding ‘Fried Crap’ on your menu may just be a ha-ha moment, but it doesn’t indicate much about restaurant cleanliness either way. On Samui, there must be hundreds of menus that have bad English in them. Occasionally even restaurant names are misspelt. Competition here on the island is intense, and to keep their doors open, restaurants have to be hygienic.
The ultimate test of any restaurant is, no surprises, the food itself. Those first mouthfuls – are they setting off the equivalent of an air-raid siren? Or is some mild inner voice suddenly piping up in alarm, however faint? It’s amazing to see guests in a restaurant frowning and saying the food may be off, then giving it to their partner to try. Don’t be fooled by the atmosphere or even the price of the place. Or by anything at all. Don’t eat food if it tastes off. Even if it’s a five-star restaurant and the chef himself brings it to you. (Yes, it happened to me, and even as I tucked in. the alarm bells rang but I quelled it with the thought of ‘it can’t be happening, not here of all places’. Well, it did, and I was soon driving the porcelain bus, as they say.)
But maybe the restaurant gets top marks all across the board, for everything, all the time – plenty of restaurants on Samui are dazzlingly hygienic. But still you need to be cautious. Perhaps your health isn’t so great. Or you’re here with small children or the elderly or you’re pregnant – these are times when you should not be indulging in foods that may cause problems, nothing to do with restaurant hygiene. Think twice before opting for that raw or lightly-cooked fish, therefore. And the old caveat, if the chicken is pink, it’s best not to eat it.
And, of course, the final tests of a restaurant. Are the locals eating there? Is it weirdly empty when all other restaurants around are brimming with guests? Don’t shrug it off. Your intuition may be all that’s standing between you and a case of the runs. But it’s surprising how relaxed some people can get on holiday, how complacent. It pays to keep one’s guard up. Sometimes it’s even time to look elsewhere for your next meal.