They're disinfected literally every day, and during the day all surfaces are regularly cleaned. If this isn't mandatory where you live, you live in a country with bad hygiene laws.
> We pay back of house staff as little as we can get away with to work every weekend and holiday in hellish conditions.
If you spend a little time thinking about the amount of restaurants versus the amount of actual people there are in a country, you will realise one is relatively easy to enforce compared to the other.
Furthermore, the conversation was about the average. It is not the case that the average human being goes around snorting coke in the toilet every day, just as it is not the case that the average restaurant is some bastion of filth. Moving around the goalposts in such a way is not a way to have a conversation in good faith, so please stop doing so.
Having worked in them for a decade I know how it works in practice. Perhaps whatever country you are from has sparking clean restaurants full of well paid, sober people but in the US, they are disgusting as a rule. My peers in the UK reported the same.
We had to call a ambulance for our health inspector once beacuse they overdosed in the bathroom. Check out Kitchen Confidential if you want to see this backed up, and even that's about the highest end restaurants in the country.
Sanitation is enforced at the local level. Making blanket statements about the U.S. carries little information.
Restaurants in New York (county) are spotless. Restaurants in San Francisco, less reliably so. The broader point holds, however--people in the restaurant industry tend to go out to restaurants.
They most assuredly are not. At least the ones I've worked in. I did a few months at a sandwich place where the owner would smoke while assembling sandwiches with his bare hands. I've never worked in SF so I can't comment on what it's like there.
Don't even get me started on those takeout only ghost kitchens. A lot of times they are running out of people's houses, rinsing lettuce in bathtubs.
If you think that's gross you should see how it's handled on the distribution end. Pallets of chicken breast sitting for hours in the summer sun and then served that evening.
We go out to eat beacuse you get desensitized to it after a while not beacuse it's clean.
They're disinfected literally every day, and during the day all surfaces are regularly cleaned. If this isn't mandatory where you live, you live in a country with bad hygiene laws.
> We pay back of house staff as little as we can get away with to work every weekend and holiday in hellish conditions.
This doesn't match where I live at all, FWIW.