Dining Halls

DINING HALLS, premises for taking meals, and in a broader sense, public catering institutions where food is not only consumed but also prepared. This primarily includes factory-kitchens with their enormous dining halls. The construction of factory-kitchens and the service they provide to consumers, in connection with the directive instructions of the Party [decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of August 19, 1931] and the government, have currently assumed very large proportions. In 1929, we had only 4 factory-kitchens, while in 1932 there were already over 100; the reach of consumers in 1929 amounted to 11 million meals, and in 1932—38 million meals. By the beginning of 1934, about 20 million people were covered by public catering. At the present time, there are the following types of public catering enterprises: preparation factories, factory-kitchens, mechanized dining halls, finishing dining halls, and distribution dining halls. A factory-kitchen is a fully developed public catering enterprise that includes all elements related to both the preparation of food and its distribution. A factory-kitchen (see Kitchen) is divided into two main parts—production and consumer: 1) production as such, which includes storage premises (refrigerators), preparation areas—dirty and clean for fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, a confectionery shop, a cold shop for preparing cold dishes and appetizers, a cooking shop, a sauce shop, a roasting department for preparing main courses, a garde-manger, and a room for storing finished food and semi-finished products; this room must be adjacent to the kitchen and preparation areas and must be provided with cold—ice baths, room iceboxes, or refrigeration units. The air temperature in the garde-manger must not exceed +8°. The production part includes washing areas for both kitchen utensils and tableware, as well as bread slicers. In the majority of factory-kitchens, in addition to the listed elements, chambers for waste and refuse are also arranged, as well as auxiliary enterprises for utilizing waste, such as: starch production, kvass production, etc. As a rule, it is necessary to provide for a number of storage rooms for containers, bones, etc. All processes of preparation, mainly the processing of food, must be provided with mechanical installations (see Kitchen). 2) The consumer-commercial part of the factory-kitchen includes changing rooms for consumers, restrooms, washrooms, a dining hall, and a buffet room or buffet counter in the dining hall. The elements of the production part of the factory-kitchen fully apply to preparation factories, which are, in essence, exclusively a production enterprise as such. The subsequent, third type of public catering dining hall, closely connected with the preparation factory, is the finishing dining hall. The elements of a finishing dining hall must be the following: 1) a production shop (kitchen) with three departments—cooking, sauce, and roasting; 2) one clean preparation area—meat-fish and vegetable; 3) a garde-manger; 4) 2 washing areas for kitchen utensils and tableware; 5) a bread slicer; 6) a storeroom for bulk products (flour, groats, sugar, salt, macaroni, etc.); 7) a dining hall with a buffet; 8) a cloakroom for visitors; 9) a washroom and restroom for visitors; 10) administrative and utility rooms; 11) a receiving area for semi-finished products; and 12) premises for service personnel and separate ones for them: a) a changing room, b) washbasins, and c) restrooms.

The fourth type of public catering dining hall is the distribution dining hall. Receiving finished food from a factory-kitchen or some mechanized dining hall, the distribution dining hall is very limited in its elements. Instead of a kitchen, there may be a small room where a stove is installed for heating food; then there is a washing area, a bread slicer, and a small storeroom. The consumer (commercial) part is the same as in an ordinary type of dining hall (at a factory-kitchen, finishing dining hall). When building a factory-kitchen, a preparation factory, or a mechanized dining hall, it is necessary to provide for the conveyor-like movement of the product from the storage premises to the consumer. It is necessary to avoid crossing flows of products—raw materials, finished products, waste, etc. Storage premises can be in the building of the enterprise itself or outside it—in the courtyard. Furthermore, it is necessary to provide for the separate storage of certain types of products—meat, fish, dairy products, fruits, and vegetables. If there are no refrigerators, it is necessary to have well-appointed iceboxes, the ice for which must come from places (bodies of water) permitted by sanitary supervision. The delivery and carrying of products from storage premises located on the territory of the site must be carried out in such a way,

so that the product is not subjected to contamination; for this, paving of the premises, appropriate transport, containers, and utensils for carrying products are required. Accordingly, the yard must be kept in proper cleanliness; special attention should be paid to the preventive fight against the spread of flies in the yard—supervision of trash bins, cesspools, and refuse pits, removal of waste and sewage at least once every 5-6 days, daily watering of refuse pits with chlorinated lime, etc. From storage rooms, products (raw materials) enter the preparation areas (dirty), where they undergo preliminary cleaning, washing, and removal of all inedible parts using mechanical installations or by manual means, after which they enter the clean preparation areas, where the product is turned into a semi-finished product. The construction of preparation areas requires impermeable floors with slopes to drains, plastered walls, and wainscoting at a height of 1.0-1.5 m, painted with oil paint. Equipment must consist, in addition to mechanical installations, of tables and tubs. Preparation areas must be supplied with good-quality water—cold and hot. Preparation areas must also be provided with well-functioning treatment facilities—sewage. From the clean preparation area, the semi-finished product enters the main workshop—the kitchen. The kitchen must be supplied with a sufficient quantity of good-quality water, have well-maintained sewage, and the floor must be impermeable—concrete, Mettlach tiles; in extreme cases, the floor may be wooden, well-joined, and treated with linseed oil. Kitchen equipment—stove, boilers, tables. The height of the kitchen room must be no less than 3 m, the light coefficient no less than 1:8. The standard area per worker in the kitchen is 5.5 m² of usable space, free from furnishings and equipment. In the kitchen, it is necessary to provide for properly functioning ventilation: in factory-preparation facilities and factory-kitchens—supply and exhaust ventilation; in other public catering enterprises—transoms, vents, and electric fans. The installation of hoods over stoves is not permitted—hoods become dusty and dirty; furthermore, condensation of vapors occurs in them, which entails the contamination of products located on the stove. Having received its final preparation in the kitchen, the food enters the serving department, located on the border of the kitchen and the dining hall. Serving tables must be equipped with marmites, i.e., warmers. A portion of the prepared food not intended for immediate serving, as well as semi-finished products, must be sent for temporary storage to the larder. Bread from the pantry enters the bread-slicing room. The latter must be adjacent to the commercial consumer area, while being within the production area. Sometimes the bread-slicing room is also used for storing bread. In such cases, the bread-slicing room must be provided with shelves (latticed) and cabinets with sliding doors; the doors must have openings for air circulation; for the purpose of proper storage of bread, these openings must be screened. If there are shelves for stacking bread on them, the latter (shelves) must be covered with curtains made of light fabric. Bread shelves must be at a distance of 25 cm from the walls. This achieves proper air circulation and the possibility of proper cleaning of the room. The air temperature in the rooms for storing bread, as well as in the bread-slicing room, must be in the range of 10-12° with a relative humidity of 65-70%. The light coefficient in the bread-slicing room must be no less than 1:8. The dining hall must be built with the calculation that the seating area corresponds to the capacity of the Dining Halls. Seating standards—1 m² per consumer; room height no less than 3 m; light coefficient 1:12; walls and ceilings must be plastered, wall wainscoting at a height of 1.5 m painted with oil paint; floors made of impermeable material, tiled or wooden, well-joined and treated with linseed oil; furnishings in dining halls must be such that they can be easily cleaned of dust and dirt; tables must be covered with clean tablecloths or oilcloths; it is desirable to have tabletops made of marble or thick glass; buffet dishes must be kept in glass display cases or be covered with metal screens, glass domes, gauze, or other light fabric; for serving dinners and buffet dishes, there must be a sufficient assortment of ladles, spoons, forks, scoops, and tongs to avoid serving products by hand. Cleaning of the dining hall or buffet room must be carried out thoroughly—airing, wiping of windows, windowsills, tables, and other furniture by the wet method; floors must be washed daily. On dining tables, slop bowls or other utensils must be placed so that the consumer does not scatter food scraps, bones, etc., on the floor and on the table. Salt shakers on tables, pepper shakers, and mustard pots must have lids with openings (for mustard pots, spoons or spatulas). For visitors, there must be boiled, cooled water in Dining Halls in barrels or decanters, with a sufficient quantity of clean glasses, mugs, and cups. The dining hall may be adjacent on one side to the kitchen and serving area, and on the other to the vestibule. In the latter, the installation of a cloakroom is provided for; standards—0.1 m² of cloakroom area per visitor (per one seating). Further, restrooms—1 seat per 50 visitors, washbasins—1 per 15-20 visitors. In the vestibule, the presence of devices for wiping feet must be provided. Administrative and utility rooms—office, director's office, staff room, etc.—must meet existing building standards. Smaller Dining Halls with low capacity, such as self-service dining halls, open-type Dining Halls (restaurants, workers' cafes), Dining Halls at institutions, must also fully meet all sanitary-hygienic and sanitary-technical requirements that are imposed on large Dining Halls regarding lighting standards, areas, height, as well as their sanitary maintenance. Deviation from established requirements may concern the number of utility rooms, the combining of some rooms into one, simplifications of apparatus, mechanization, etc.—Regarding collective farm and state farm Dining Halls, deviations are also permitted regarding equipment, utensils (built-in boilers, iron utensils), and regarding some standards.

The requirements for the maintenance of these Dining Halls must not differ in any way from generally established rules. Sanitary service of Dining Halls must proceed along the lines of implementing sanitary, as well as anti-epidemic, measures. The former include measures concerning the sanitary maintenance of the Dining Hall, storage of products, condition of transport, cleaning of the courtyard, etc.; anti-epidemic measures include checking the health of Dining Hall workers, testing them for bacillus carriage, monitoring the staff's adherence to all rules of personal hygiene, examination of products and monitoring of the technological process and the quality of prepared food, supervision of proper dishwashing, supervision of the quality of water used for production purposes, and the fight against flies. The Decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of December 22, 1933, provides invaluable concrete instructions on how to structure preventive work at food industry and public catering enterprises; these instructions cover such issues as the quality of raw materials and finished products, the organization of laboratory control of products, personal hygiene of personnel, and the completion of a sanitary-technical minimum by all employees of food enterprises. One of the essential sanitary measures is the implementation of a sanitary minimum in Dining Halls. These simplest sanitary measures, carried out by the efforts of the working public itself, must cover all areas of the Dining Hall's work: the courtyard with all courtyard structures—sheds, storerooms, icehouse, places for storing waste and refuse; production premises, where the sanitary minimum must cover such points as keeping all equipment, inventory, and the premises themselves clean; the dining room—keeping the premises clean, properly organized cleaning, ventilation of premises, wiping of glass in windows, doors, etc.; storage facilities, where it is necessary to carry out measures along the lines of the sanitary minimum that ensure the cleanliness of the premises and the proper storage of products. Special attention when implementing the sanitary minimum must be paid to the maintenance of toilets, stairs, and other administrative and utility rooms. A physician serving a public catering enterprise must: 1) conduct daily regular supervision of the sanitary condition of the enterprise, entering all their remarks and suggestions into a sanitary logbook, necessarily indicating deadlines for completion; 2) carefully conduct an examination of incoming raw materials and outgoing products; for this task, they involve the public and join them in the quality control commission; 3) in necessary cases, take samples of products and prepared food for examination in a sanitary or production laboratory; 4) participate in the compilation of menus and food breakdowns, taking into account the needs of shock workers and night shift workers; 5) participate in drawing up a schedule for visiting the Dining Hall, taking into account the fight against queues as a preventive measure in the sense of the consumer's nervous and physical fatigue, as well as the transmission of various infectious diseases; 6) maintain careful observation of the fulfillment of personal hygiene and medical examination rules by public catering enterprise workers; 7) maintain contact with medical-preventive institutions serving the main mass of Dining Hall consumers in order to identify cases of gastrointestinal diseases related to nutrition; 8) organize a sanitary minimum at the enterprise, involving the working public in this matter; 9) organize the fight against flies, cockroaches, and rodents, for which it is necessary to establish specific preventive measures for the maintenance of the courtyard, cesspools and refuse pits, garbage bins, and for the removal of waste and refuse; 10) impose administrative penalties (fines) on persons who do not comply with sanitary rules and, in necessary cases, bring the guilty parties to judicial responsibility.