BENGALURU: Bengaluru loves its restaurants. Market research shows that the city eats out at least once in three days. But do restaurants return the affection?
Not really, if recent raids by the city corporation officials are anything to go by. The officials found food cooked in unhygienic conditions and that has gone stale ready to be served. They fined the eateries between `2,000 and `20,000.
Rathan U Kelkar, Commissioner of Food Safety at Public Health Institute, says that their raids too revealed similar offences. “Many were using ingredients that have gone bad, particularly oil,” he says. The department now holds training and awareness sessions for eateries.
City Express found that the restaurants start cutting corners even while shopping for the kitchen. We spoke to a few workers at various restaurants and found that these eateries get rotten vegetables from various vendors and use it for cooking. “We get them for throwaway prices from vegetable shops nearby and use them for cooking,” says one employee at an eatery in Koramangala.
Vegetable vendors confirm this. At various smaller shops and wholesale shops in KR
Market, we found restaurant staff buying damaged vegetables.
“They are employees of various restaurants,” says one vendor, and explains why they sell it to them so cheap. “Otherwise we would have to dump these vegetables. Even juice shop owners collect fruits that get damaged while loading and unloading them from lorries.”
Joint Commissioner, in charge of solid-waste management at BBMP, Sarfaraz Khan, put a post on his Facebook page with the details from the raid conducted last Thursday. He named two expensive eateries as offenders. One, which serves popular grills, Khan wrote, had “unclean” kitchen and so it was levied `20,000 as fine. In another continental restaurant, the team found stale bread stored in an “open area”. A burger outlet, too functioned in “unhygienic condition.”
The restaurants had ample warning. Two months ago, the same team from the city corporation had carried out inspections at restaurants on Lavelle Road. Then too Khan had posted that kabab skewers were kept where employees of the restaurant cleaned their hands, rusty knives were being used and meat was marinated in dirty backyards.