Restaurant kitchens and restrooms are two places that health inspectors scrutinize most when grading a restaurant, but the one of the biggest areas of contact with customers is at the bar. Bartenders serve food, drinks garnished with fruit, and other items that can create a high volume of filth in a night's work. If not cleaned properly, this high traffic and high revenue area quickly becomes unsafe and unsanitary and could ultimately drive business away. Here are some tips for tackling the bar area and removing the dirt and bacteria for a proper restaurant cleaning.
Bar Areas of Concern
In the course of an evening at the bar, you may witness drinks spilled, food dropped on the bar chairs and floor, limes discarded on the ground, and even cigarettes and other bar items thrown into the mix. A bar is the equivalent of a wait station and a kitchen for cocktails combined.
Spilled drinks coat the surface of the floor and penetrate the porous grout lines, while foot traffic grinds food particles between grout and tile in the floor. Meanwhile, the fruits that garnish drinks attract fruit flies—as do the liquors themselves, when left uncovered. The combination of food-related soils, which tend to be oily, and liquids with high sugar content create a particularly difficult environment to clean. On top of that, brisk bar business tends to increase restroom traffic as well. Each of these areas, as well as the refrigerators that hold beer and wine, must be addressed to maintain a high level of cleanliness in your restaurants. To keep the conditions sanitary, you have to properly clean the areas after every shift and be prepared to maintain the level of cleanliness during service.
A New Level of Restaurant Cleaning
Traditional cleaning methods for bar floors, counters, ice bins, and refrigerators involve mops and rags. These outdated cleaning methods often do as much—maybe more—harm than they do good because they tend to spread the matter around instead of removing it. Kaivac's dispense-and-vac method of cleaning uses fresh cleaning solution and vacuum extraction to physically remove the soils, grease and liquid, which also reduces the risk of cross-contamination.
Rather than dragging dirt and contaminants from the restroom floor to the bar area and possibly infecting patrons, Kaivac's cleaning system removes soils and bacteria on the spot. There's no chance to carry contaminants between restaurant areas, because the mops are eliminated. Using the OmniFlex dispense-and-vac system, which is 30 times more effective than the old systems, similar techniques are applied to the refrigerators behind the bar, the ice bins, and other areas where germs can spread.
Bartenders begin the night knowing that the bar area is clean, and they can keep it that way using Kaivac tools and disinfectant sprays. As with solutions for commercial kitchen cleaning, maintaining a healthy environment is typically less expensive than using the traditional methods. Kaivac takes restaurants to a new level of clean.
To learn more about Kaivac systems in food service environments, visit here.