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Whether at the Chez Michael restaurant, the Heron Rock Bistro or the 4 Mile Restaurant & Pub or for that matter, any restaurant at all in Melbourne, food safety is vitally important. No matter how fantastic your business may be, a simply food handling mistake by your staff could be a serious, even insurmountable setback to your business.

The restaurant business is all about repeat customers and public perception of your establishment. Your reputation is everything. If you have even one lawsuit concerning food handling or food preparation mistakes in your kitchen, it can spell disaster- not just for legal defense fees, either. Your reputation could be seriously harmed, even ruined.

You make sure that proper food handling procedures are followed at your restaurant; you need to ensure kitchen staff are well aware of the risks which a case of food poisoning presents to your business. You need to be prepared in the event that health inspectors should decide to drop by for a surprise visit as well. Employees who see improper food handling in your kitchen are also a risk to your business, as they may decide to tell the world what they know if they lose their job.

There’s more to it all than just proper food storage and waste disposal, too.

Food preparation areas must be kept clean at all times. While this sounds easy enough, it is very easy to do this wrong. You must use different cutting boards for meat, seafood and vegetables, for instance. Some restaurants use stainless steel surfaces for food preparation - this can dull knives and according to some, impart a hint of metallic flavor to meats. This is harmless, but hardly good for your reputation. Plastic cutting boards are better as they are easy to clean and inherently more sanitary than are wooden cutting boards. After use, each cutting board must be washed thoroughly. For deep cleaning, chlorine bleach can be employed, but make sure to rinse well if bleach is used in cleaning these surfaces.

Utensils also must be washed after each dish they are used to prepare.

To keep them free of harmful bacteria, meats must always be cooked to a minimal internal temperature. For red meats and pork, this temperature is a minimum if 69 degrees centigrade. For seafood it is 74 degrees. Even if a rare steak has been ordered, it must be cooked to at least this minimum temperature for at least 15 seconds to minimize the risk of food poisoning. Any meat which is not very fresh should be cooked to very well done.

Preparing raw foods such as sushi requires extreme care. Serving these foods really means that you have to just have a top-notch clean kitchen and preparation staff, period, in addition to making doubly sure your sushi supplier is very sanitary. Disposable gloves and hair coverings or tie-backs must always be worn by people handling sushi and the preparation area should be kept so clean that, as the saying goes, one could eat off the floor. Any sushi that is not at its freshest needs to be thrown out.

It boggles the mind how many kitchen workers do not wash their hands in between preparing meals, even after handling raw meats. Between meal preparation hand washing is a must and washing one’s hands in between preparing different foods (switching from meat to vegetables, for instance) is, to say the least, a good idea.

By enforcing a strict kitchen sanitation and food handling program, you will be protecting the interests of your customers as well as those of your restaurant.