What type of professional kitchen is the most difficult to clean? Surprisingly enough, size or age do not pay much importance on the matter. My crew and I have been cleaning kitchens for over twenty years, and the toughest challenges we have faced had been in pizzerias.
Wait, really? The cosy little pizza places with the homely feel about them, and the unmistakable spirit of sunshine and dolce vita? This cannot be right! And yet, when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If you want to pick large restaurants that offer high cuisine or ethnic food, you have to understand they work with a lof of prefabricated products. While their kitchens are not as clean as hospital wards, they are much better-organised than you would expect. Besides, their kitchen stuff cleans them after every shift, from top to bottom.
The backroom of a pizzeria is the perfect example of organised chaos. It is also the nightmare of a professional cleaner – you have flour in the air and all over the countertops and the floor; you have tomato sauce on every utensil in a ten-yard radius; you have olive oil, pepperoni, peppers, at least five or six types of meat, onions…
Regardless of the efforts of the stuff, you cannot keep all these ingredients under sanitary control. The main culprits are the flour and the oil – they both burn within the furnaces/ovens, creating a charred screen that is particularly hard to remove. After a while, even the professional detergents that most restaurants apply in their daily hygienic maintenance, become useless, and you have to employ industrial-grade materials.
So the next time you go to your favourite pizza place, enjoy it to the fullest – but know that some people dread even the mention of it!