Can you double as the food police?
If not, are you prepared to kill an attendee? Keith makes some excellent points about how a good risk manager takes the food prep into account, along with all those other risk factors. And he’s also right that you can’t tell the quality of food safety by the niceness of the facility — I remember back in my teenage years working as a waitress in a very swanky restaurant where we literally picked the cockroaches out of the french onion soup vat before popping on the toast and cheese and broiling it briefly (it was in a very old building, but still, this was our standard of practice. There were tongs dedicated to roach-picking right next to the soup vat). While I’m sure that would never happen nowadays, packing a meat thermometer for a quick check, while it probably would tick off the chef, isn’t a bad idea.
