Bharat SainiLast Updated on November 5, 2020 by Bharat Saini
You’ve found a property, hired the kitchen staff and renovated the dining room – your dream of opening your own restaurant is not far from becoming reality. However, with an increasing awareness of what constitutes a healthy diet, you might be having second thoughts about offering an indulgent menu. Though enjoying the odd treat from time to time doesn’t cause much harm, it is possible to ensure that your restaurant operates in a health conscious way.
Here are some tips on how to run a healthy restaurant.
Opt for a plant-based menu
From vegan to paleo and keto to gluten free, there are many different dietary regimes out there that promise health benefits. To follow some of these principles in a simplified way at your restaurant, you could design a plant-based menu with one or two meat dishes to satisfy those diners who like meat. A plant-based menu has not only proven to have great health benefits, but it is better for the environment by reducing meat consumption. Source your fresh fruit and veg from a greengrocers such as Veg and More that you can then turn into mouth-watering vegetarian dishes that your diners won’t be able to resist.
Provide dietary information
Due to the increasing health concerns over diets, many people might like to have access to nutritional information about the dishes on your menu to help them make an informed decision about what to order. You could, for instance, at a basic level, include the amount of calories in a particular dish, along with allergy information and whether the dish is suitable for those following particular diets such as veganism. You could even take it one step further by marking if a dish has particular health benefits, such as slow-release carbs or boosting heart health.
Use healthier cooking methods
When preparing your fresh, plant-based menu, you could increase the health value even further by using healthier cooking methods. For instance, vegetables lose their nutritional value when they are boiled in water; steam them as a nutritionally rich alternative. As vegetables always lose some nutritional value in cooking you could even serve some raw for a nutritional boost, such as carrots and cauliflower. Fried foods, although tasty, have a bad reputation for being high in fat due to being cooked in butter or oil. You could grill foods as an alternative, or perhaps even use an air fryer.
Ensure maximum hygiene and cleanliness
Running a healthy restaurant is not only confined to the nutritional value of the menu – a restaurant serving nutrient-dense plant-based dishes could still make its clientele ill through a lack of basic hygiene causing food poisoning such as salmonella. Ensuring maximum hygiene and cleanliness in your restaurant is especially important now given the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Use a checklist for maintaining hygiene standards at your restaurants, which includes cleanliness tasks such as ensuring that staff keep good personal hygiene and cleaning surfaces and equipment after every contact with food.
