How Clean is Your Restaurant Table?

Once a week I meet one of my friends at a fancy pants bread and pastry shop.  You know, those places where they sell overpriced little things with whipped cream and chocolate and a few berries on top, and breads with olives and nuts in them.  Some of the loaves have French names.  The bread does not come sliced.  They sell soup served in bowls made of hollowed out loaves of bread.  Does anyone know what they do with the bread they scoop out of the bread bowls?  No one eats the bread bowl.  Aren't there people starving somewhere?  I've seen them picking through trash cans downtown looking for edible leftovers in "doggy bags" and take out containers.  Why don't we just take the loaves, not scoop out the centers, serve the soup in reusable ceramic bowls, and serve the loaves of bread to the folks who have to pick through trash cans for food?  Where are all the green minded folks?  Are they eating soup out of bread bowls at the fancy pants bread bakery?

I have sat in the (let us call it) Fancy Pants Bakery (a purely fictional name, not to be confused with any bakery anywhere that might have that or similar name) and watched the servers who are also often the bussers who also swab the tables with a rag they carry around.  That swabbing is supposed to clean the table between diners.  First of all, they do not always clean the table between diners.  Second, they just sling the rag over the table in a casual, quick, much less than thorough way.  The entire table surface is not cleaned nor are all crumbs and surface matter removed.  The crumbs may end up on the chairs.  Some chairs may already have crumbs.  I took a paper napkin and wiped the surface of a table and the white napkin showed a significant amount of dirt.  I got another napkin and cleaned the table again, and again the napkin picked up a second layer of dirt. I had to clean crumbs off the chairs before we could sit in them.  I felt like Adrian Monk.  Who trains the staff?  Are they trained at all?  Does a manager just say, "Clean the tables" and assume the teenager knows how to do it?

Most of the staff at the Fancy Pants Bakery are teen or twenty-somethings.  Ten percent appear to be older.  The older workers appear to do a better job.  This observation may not be statistically significant. I blame management for not training all workers on proper cleaning techniques.  I wonder how many folks have coughed and sneezed on the tables that rag has been slung over.  There does not appear to be a disinfecting spray used.  How many babies have drooled on their hands and rubbed them on the table and put hand in mouth?  The cleaning rag just takes the particulates from one table to another.  Then the cleaner serves food!  Then she buses dirty dishes, cups, and cutlery that a coughing couple handled.  Then she serves more food, often while carrying that table cleaning rag.

I brought the lax table cleaning style to the attention of one Fancy Pants manager.  I think he was manager because he was in his mid-twenties, maybe near thirty years old, thus he had seniority.  He said the tables were being cleaned.  I told him to walk to one of the tables with me and see the outcome of the cleaning.  There were visible crumbs, rings from drink glasses, and greasy areas.  I explained that the person cleaning the tables only pushed the rag in an arc over the table, quickly pushing some of the more visible crumbs and food pieces onto the floor or chairs.  I fault management.  The workers need to be trained, i.e., taught how to do the job.  He agreed.  I did not even get a free whipped cream and chocolate thing for bringing the disgusting state of the tables to his attention.

Final Report:  Two weeks later the situation is not much better.  I had to stroll around the Fancy Pants for quite a while until I found a table that appeared clean with chairs that did not have crumbs.  It was a challenge.  I guess Fancy Pants folk don't care if they sit in crumbs and set their elbows on dirty tables.  They just want their pretty, fancy pants food.  My friend said we could go to places with names like "Burger Royalty" and "Precious Metal Arches" instead of Fancy Pants.  I'm thinking the better option is home cooking.  There are still frozen bison burgers in the deep freeze and a plastic bottle of ketchup in the fridge.