What’s more important in food: flavour or filth?

Restaurants and hawker stalls with questionable hygiene are nothing new, but this needs to change.

COMMENT

If the visible parts of a restaurant are enough to turn your stomach, what about the places you cannot see which are only accessible to staff, like the kitchen, storeroom and back room where most of the food is prepared?

To get an idea of a restaurant’s hygiene levels, take a look at the toilets. If the toilets are dirty, with leaky taps, flooded floors, inadequate toilet paper, no soap or paper towels for drying hands, just imagine what the kitchen is like, where only members of the staff are allowed.

Last week, Malaysians were shocked by a video clip showing workers at Raj’s Banana Leaf Restaurant washing plates near a puddle of murky water in the back lane. The eatery was ordered to close immediately pending an investigation. Its workers meanwhile have been sent for a food handling course. They have also been given anti-typhoid jabs.

If not for the observant customer or passerby, would we have been any the wiser? As it is, the publicity generated by this incident has no doubt prompted other restaurants to pull up their socks and ensure that they comply with the relevant by-laws, although some have also been shut down by enforcement officers.

It may sound obvious, but restaurants and hawker stalls with questionable hygiene are nothing new. There have been previous incidents which were just as bad, if not worse. Perishables like vegetables are stored and washed on the floor adjacent to the toilets. Workers use a mop to clean the floors, then use the same mop to wipe table tops. Dirty rags which are used to wipe up spills or filthy work surfaces are then used to clean tables.

In some restaurants and clubs, even established ones, rats can be seen scurrying up the curtains or peeping from behind table legs.

In other places, food is prepared in the morning and left in open containers for customers to view. Diners who see flies hovering over the food may find, on closer scrutiny, that the flies have also laid eggs.

Not many of us request for fresh cutlery if the utensils we are given are encrusted with bits of hardened food. When we find lipstick stains on the rim of a glass, we simply turn it around and drink from the other side.

So do Malaysians really care about dirty restaurants, or are we more interested in how the food tastes? We complain about dirty eateries, but many of us continue to patronise such places. Perhaps we don’t really care about hygiene as long as we can eat the food we are used to.

There are many improvements that can be made, but several things are needed in order for this to happen.

Firstly, customers need to be prepared to complain, both to the management and to the authorities, if they see something they know is wrong or unhygienic. It is only when we demand high standards that restaurant owners will perform.

There have been complaints that enforcement officers only appear when a new restaurant opens. The establishment then finds that these officers will not make a second appearance. This means that unscrupulous restaurant owners may take advantage of the situation and let things slide.

Workers also need to be vigilant, and demand that their employers abide by the laws including in training and encouraging safe work practices. This may not be possible in today’s employment climate, where it is difficult to find reliable workers. Many of them are also illegal and lack the necessary training. They may also be unaware of the law, and therefore unable to report their employers’ wrongdoings.

Last but not least, people who want to run a successful restaurant should provide all required facilities, including a dishwashing area. Raj’s Banana Leaf failed to do so.

Mariam Mokhtar is an FMT columnist.