Restaurant ensures food safety with weekly inspections

While the state of Mississippi enforces food safety rules, one chef said restaurants need their own method of making sure the food arriving at guests’ tables comes from a clean kitchen.

“It’s like the head coach of a football team. ... You have to have a system,” said Jon Pixler, corporate chef for Bravo!, Sal & Mookie’s and Broad Street Baking Co. and Cafe.

Between May 1, 2011, and May 1 of this year, Bravo! has received five A’s and one B, Sal & Mookies has received four A’s and one B and Broad Street has received four A’s and two B’s.

Pixler said the state Department of Health inspects his restaurants four times a year, but Mangia Bene Restaurant Management Group, the corporation that owns the restaurants, conducts internal inspections 52 times a year — once each week.

It has its own checklist to tick off, and one of the corporation’s partners, Dan Blumenthal, is usually the one with the clipboard in hand, making sure the surfaces are sanitized and bases are covered.

The Health Department requires one certified manager to be on staff. But in Pixler’s restaurants, every manager — bar, floor and kitchen — is required to be ServSafe certified so at least one person who is certified in food safety is always on duty.

The certification lasts five years and can be attained through the Mississippi Hospitality and Restaurant Association or other entities.

With the juggling act required to run a restaurant, monitoring food safety would be too intense if he were the only one who had a good understanding, Pixler said.

The key to making it work, he said, is training and repetition, practice and vigilance.

“It requires a lot of focus and effort on my part to make sure it’s done on a daily basis,” Pixler said.

Some of the guidelines may seem insignificant, but each serves a purpose. For instance, if anyone in the kitchen has something to drink while on duty, the drink must have a lid and the staff member must drink from a straw, thereby preventing the risk of mouth-to-hand contamination.

Just as important as recipes are to his job, Pixler said, so are food safety and cleanliness.

“It’s all of equal importance,” he said. “Without cleanliness, I can’t cook.”

It is not enough to simply list rules, Pixler says.

“You have to go back there and make sure they’re doing it,” he said.

Good form and handling techniques require practice, he said, and the seriousness of preventing illness can’t be diminished. It’s not just about reputation, Pixler said.

“You don’t want someone getting salmonella.”

To stand the test of time, though, restaurants must have a system for maintaining good food-safety practices.

“There’s a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things, and that’s the bottom line,” Pixler said.