The day itself: the walkthrough

Somebody walks in and identifies themselves. From that moment the visit follows a fairly predictable shape, and knowing the shape is most of what turns a stressful hour into an ordinary one. This topic is the walkthrough: where it starts, what gets touched, what gets asked, and what you do while it happens.

🚪 The first five minutes

The visit is usually unannounced and often at a bad moment, which is not bad luck — a Saturday lunch shows more than a Tuesday morning does.

What to do is short:

• Ask for identification and note who they are and the time. This is normal and expected, not obstruction.
• Get the right person with them. Ideally the manager or whoever knows where things are. If that person is not in, whoever is there accompanies them — the visit does not wait.
• Do not send anybody running ahead. The sudden burst of cleaning in the next room is visible from anywhere in a small building, and it is one of the few things that genuinely changes how the rest of the visit goes.
• Have the folder within reach rather than starting to look for it. That folder is the compliance course's whole output and this is the moment it earns its six hours a month.

Then you walk with them. Not behind at a distance, and not crowding — alongside, answering what is asked, writing down what they mention.

🔎 What gets looked at, and roughly in what order

Inspectors differ and jurisdictions differ, but the route through a small restaurant is fairly consistent because it follows the food.

• Handwashing stations first, very often, because they are quick and they say a lot: reachable, soap, hot water, something to dry with, not being used as a shelf.
• Cold storage. Doors opened, temperatures taken with their own probe rather than read off your display, the order of raw and ready-to-eat looked at, labels and dates checked.
• The line during service. Holding temperatures, cross-contamination in practice, tongs and boards, cloths, what is sitting out and for how long.
• Prep and dish. Thawing, the wash setup, sanitiser concentration — often tested — and how chemicals are stored.
• The building. Floors and drains, ceilings above food, signs of pests, waste and grease outside, ventilation, the state of the finishes.
• The records. Usually last and usually specific: not "show me your logs" but "show me last Tuesday".

Notice that the first five are the food safety course made physical, and the sixth is the compliance course. Nothing on that route is a surprise if you have done the previous topic's self-inspection, because it is the same walk.

💬 What they ask, and who they ask

Increasingly the questions matter as much as the surfaces, and they are often addressed to whoever is standing there rather than to you. That is deliberate: a system that lives in the owner's head is not a system.

The questions are rarely trick ones. How do you know the chicken is done? What do you do if the fridge reads high? Where do you wash your hands? What happens if somebody comes in sick? Who is trained, and in what?

Which is why the honest answer is always better than the correct-sounding one. "I check it with the probe" beats a fluent description of a procedure nobody follows, because the follow-up question is going to be "show me", and it always is. And if a cook does not know, "I would ask the chef" is a genuinely acceptable answer — it is a system with a route in it.

Staff certification comes up here too, and it is a paperwork question with a training answer. The programmes below are the ones the printed handbook this run inherits from listed:

🤐 What not to do while they are there

Four things make a visit worse and all four are instincts rather than decisions.

• Do not argue on the spot. There is a time to disagree and it is in writing, afterwards, through whatever route your authority provides. Doing it in the kitchen changes nothing on the report and changes a lot about the tone.
• Do not guess. "I do not know, let me find out" is a complete answer. An invented one becomes a second finding when it turns out to be wrong.
• Do not hide anything. Moving a box out of sight, closing a door, quietly binning something — all of it is more visible than people think, and all of it converts a maintenance issue into a credibility issue.
• Do not treat it as a personal judgement. The instinct to defend the kitchen is strong and it is the enemy of the useful question, which is: is that true, and if it is, what do I change?

Do one thing instead: write down everything they mention, as they mention it. Not just the formal findings — the asides too, the things said in passing that never reach the report. Those are free advice from somebody who has walked through several hundred kitchens, and they are what the next topic turns into a list.