The Dirtiest and Most Germy Item at Restaurants

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If you stopped to think how many germs were on the items you use at a restaurant, you may never eat at one again. Some of those items are handled by multiple people each day and may not be wiped down or cleaned regularly. We can items like the menu and condiment dispensers to have bacterial on their surface but what is the scientific evidence? What is the dirtiest and germiest item at restaurants and how much bacteria do they have?

customer reading restaurant menu — Are restaurant menus the grossest, dirtiest, and germiest items in the restaurant? Are they even worse than the restroom?

Good Morning America, which has a thing for testing sundry items for germs, went out with a researcher from the University of Arizona to swab typical table-top items at 12 restaurants in New York, Ohio, and Arizona. These swabs were then examined in a lab for total bacteria count and coliforms. Coliforms are a large class of bacteria which, if found, can indicate the presence of fecal matter.

Is The Menu Is the Germiest Item on the Table?

What do you typically find on a restaurant table? Ketchup, mustard, salt, pepper, sugar, sauce, etc. All these items could have been handled by dozens of people. Which do you think harbors the most bacteria? The menu or the condiment containers?

According to this test, it was the menu. You can guess that a restaurant menu can be very germy, but the germiest? It surprised me as well. But, if you think waiters or the host staff regularly wipe down menus between seatings, you are mistaken. And when they do, it’s probably with a germ-infested cloth. The proper way to disinfect menus would be with a food-safe disinfectant and a clean cloth.

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The menus tested had an average count of 185,000 bacteria. That is around 100 times the amount you’d typically find on a toilet seat! These results make perfect sense. While the condiments and sauces will be handled by some diners, the menus are handled by everyone, including the waiters.

Oddly, although you’d think the ketchup bottle would be number two, it was the pepper shakers with the second largest number of bacteria. Although the story does not make it clear, it seems that the researchers actually found bacteria in the pepper itself, not just on the outside of the shaker.

Apparently, according to Dr. Chuck Gerba of the University of Arizona, bacteria like pepper. Ketchup bottles tested somewhere in the middle, and sugar had the lowest count.

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Dirty Ice Cubes In Bars and Restaurants

I’ll bet you weren’t expecting this. One of the dirtiest items at bars and restaurants may be the ice cubes. Actually, ice machines used in restaurants are a big problem in terms of food safety. They are rarely cleaned out and can become quite nasty especially when proper ice scoops aren’t used but instead employees place their hands in the ice to scoop it out with a cup or some other improper instrument. Ice machines developed mold and “pink slime.” No not the pink slime Jamie Oliver whines about, but a biofilm made up of microorganisms. This film forms on the inside of the ice machine and provides a protected habitat for microbes that is hard to clean out. A quick wipe-down may do little to remove it. But, when ice is taken out, some of this nasty goop may go with it. Dirty ice machine is one of the health violations most frequently scene on restaurant inspection reports.

A study from 2017 in the Journal of Water and Health called Microbiological quality of ice and ice machines used in food establishments in the Istanbul region tested the hygienic conditions of ice making machines in various food enterprises. Escherichia coli (E coli) was detected in seven (6.7%) ice samples and 23 (21.9%) ice chest samples. Psychrophilic bacteria were detected in 83 (79.0%) of 105 ice chests and in 68 (64.7%) of 105 ice samples, whereas Enterococci were detected only in 13 (12.4%) ice samples. Coliforms were detected in 13 (12.4%) water samples, 71 (67.6%) ice chests and 54 (51.4%) ice samples. However, E coli was negative in all water samples. ¹

In 2013 there was an outbreak of norovirus caused by the ice at a golf resort in Phoenix. And, an undercover study by the BBC in 2017 found human fecal bacteria in 3 out of 10 ice samples from McDonald’s, 6 out of 10 samples from Burger King, and 7 out of 10 samples from KFC. ²,³

Were These Restaurant Bacteria Harmful?

As icky and scary as all this seems, don’t freak out and become a compulsive restaurant hand-washer. Most of the bacteria found were not all that harmful. While you could pick up a respiratory infection, and while the very young or very old should be of more concern, you’ve probably handled hundreds of nasty menus in your life and drank as many nasty beverages. You may just have become sick from some of them but, obviously, you usually don’t.

There is not much you can do about the tabletop condiments and sauces besides to avoid using them. You could, I suppose, ask for fresh and clean containers but you’d have to take your waiter’s word that they were “fresh and clean.” You could take it upon yourself to wipe them down with a disinfectant wipe, but the restaurant would probably frown on this activity.

While some restaurants do clean the outside of the containers, and regularly empty out salt and pepper shakers to sterilize them, don’t count on it. The most you can hope for is a quick wipe with a (dirty?) cloth if one of the containers appears grubby.

But as for the menu, well, you can simply go to the restroom and wash your hands after you order, apply a hand sanitizer such as Purell, or use Purell Sanitizing Hand Wipes.

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