The First Thing You Should Do After Touching A Restaurant Menu

Cleanliness is essential in any dining establishment. Hence, local, state, and federal agencies inspect restaurants for hygiene regularly. There are also ways for customers to judge how clean an eatery is (such as checking out the bathroom). However, potential health hazards sometimes hide in plain sight when you go out to eat. One of the dirtiest items in any restaurant is the menu — and that's why you should always wash your hands after touching it.

Why do menus get so dirty? The answer is simple: Customers all touch them. As effective as the restaurant may be at cleaning its own facility, the staff can't control their guests' hygiene. Some diners might be sick or may not have washed their hands in a long time. A little kid could bring their favorite Matchbox car and drive it all over a few menus. Other times, they might get dirty just because of accidents, such as spills or people dropping them on the floor.

The germs on menus are no joke. Ibtehal Alsallaiy investigated the subject as a graduate student at Clemson University. As part of a 2013 master's thesis, Alsallaiy conducted a study which found that "bacteria can transfer from a menu to the consumer's hands and that bacteria can survive on menus even after 48 [hours]." Staphylococcus (the cause of staph infections) was the main concern in that case, but a variety of pathogens could be lurking. In fact, restaurant menus are often the germiest item on the table, sometimes harboring 100 times as many bacteria as a toilet seat.

How about a restaurant with QR code menus that you scan directly with your cell phone? Unfortunately, those digital formats aren't guaranteed to be a hygienic option. There's no single authoritative count of microbes on the average cell phone, but suffice it to say, the device could harbor a lot of bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Per a 2020 review of previous studies, all of the above pathogens have been found on cell phones in significant quantities (via Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease). So it's still worth a quick trip to the hand wash sink.

After ordering with a touch-screen kiosk at a fast food and fast casual restaurant you'll also want to clean your hands. For an example of why, consider what Metro.uk and London Metropolitan University uncovered when they collaborated on a 2018 study of eight McDonald's locations. The researchers detected traces of fecal matter on every ordering screen they tested. "These cause the kind of infections that people pick up in hospitals," said Paul Matewele, the microbiologist who led the study.

Don't restaurants clean these items? Many do, but there's not always a clear regulation that requires it. Those that wipe off menus may use a combination of products (like detergent and disinfectant), similar to the process used for other food prep cleaning. Regardless, it helps to have a (hopefully washed) hand in protecting your own health.