Depends on the restaurant. If they have a good reputation and want to stay that way, they will stay on the straight and narrow.djm wrote:LC, you are scaring me. I love shrimp, but only eat it at restaurants. I love steamed shrimp (actually, most seafood is better steamed). I hope restaurants don't follow the preservation methods you outlined.
Chains are fairly safe, as they use frozen, shipped-in, quality-controlled stuff. Many restaurants simply purchase pre-made, frozen entrees and such, and that's usually quite safe. Might not be gourmet, but it's safe.
In grad school one summer, I worked at a very famous French Quarter restaurant. The experience totally changed my notions about restaurant dining. This place made everything from scratch--nothing came pre-made.
They had turtle soup, which was delicious the day it was made. That's when the staff ate it--the day it was made. It wasn't made EVERY day, because it was a pain to make. It sat out in a vat all night, was left to cool toward the end, and then went into the fridge. Next day, and next, a load of lemon juice got dumped in to cut the not-quite-fresh taste. Eventually, they'd have only a little left, at which point they would often make some fresh and mix it with the leftovers, which tasted so bad at that point that it couldn't be served straight up.
There were several famous dishes made with lobster. A giant load of lobster would be steamed early in the day and tossed into a giant gray dishpan thing, covered with salted water. Unrefrigerated. (And, mind you, the kitchen was HOT.) Upon getting an order for a lobster dish, a cook would haul out a lobster, brush it with butter, and stick it under the broiler a bit. Instant broiled lobster. Or, for dishes requiring sauces and such, cut the meat out of the shell, mix it with the sauce and stuffing crumbs or whatever, then stuff it back into the shell and toss it under the broiler.
Everybody knew not to eat anything containing lobster--and you could tell which new employees had been sneaking lobster, because they'd be deathly ill the next day. The dishpan of lobster was, I figured, a seething soup of Staphylococcus from the kitchen staff's ungloved hands fishing in there for lobsters.
Fish which had to be freshly cooked was ok, because it was actually kept on ice in the refrigerator until cooking. Beef was safe because it was aged and kept in the cooler until needed. The lobster, on the other hand, had to be cooked in advance and was then too hot to go back in the fridge, and so much of it was used that it was inconvenient to chill and reheat, so it was left out.
The sanitation in this place was unspeakable. There were exposed wooden beams crossing the ceiling--it was, after all, a famous old building--and rats scampered along them all night. The inspectors came in and saw all of it, and it didn't bother them a bit. We knew about people getting sick, because they'd often report it to the health department, but the health department just called to let us know. There were no sanctions and nobody forced them to improve their methods.
