You’re going out to eat dinner with family and/or friends at a restaurant. After driving (or riding a bus/train) and touching the various exposed surfaces of your conveyance, you arrive at the restaurant. You grab the door handle and pull; if you’re civilized, you grab another part of the door to hold it open for your dining companions. The waitstaff shows you to your table and hands you a menu, which you diligently paw through and browse in detail before placing an order. Your server places a plate of bread on the table, and since you’re extra hungry, he’ll be returning soon with the appetizer you ordered - a nice platter of calamari rings, or maybe some mozzarella sticks (or some other finger-food you happen to like).
The appetizer will arrive in five minutes. Do you hang around to chat with your companions, or do you excuse yourself and head to the restroom to wash your hands?
I don’t consider myself germ-phobic, but I have difficulty fighting off colds and such.
Accordingly, I wash or sanitize my hands often as an everyday matter of course. Often in a restaurant, I will go to the restroom immediately after ordering and wash my hands. This is really just a continuation of what I do at home – wash hands before eating, every time.
My wife always has hand sanitizer in her purse. If we are dining as a family, and it’s inconvenient to get up and wash hands in the restroom … I will use the hand sanitizer before eating.
One of the little things I love about sushi restaurants is that they give you warm towels or some other means of washing hands at the table. I wish that was more of a thing at restaurants in general.
Correct. I’m not talking about using the toilet - I’m merely asking whether you wash your hands in the time between ordering and handling your food.
Called oshibori, this is standard practice at just about every restaurant in Japan. I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan as a tourist, and I have mixed feelings about it. It’s undoubtedly better than doing nothing, but I think it’s probably not as good as using soap and running water.
I don’t as a matter of course, although I do if I have any reason to think my hands aren’t clean, or if I go to the bathroom. But come to think of it, the first thing I do when I come home is wash my hands as perimeter defense, so it is probably a good idea to do it in a restaurant.
I’m at least an obsessive a hand-washer as most other people (you get in that habit as a pathologist), but I don’t wash my hands after being shown to a restaurant table.
Given what goes on behind closed doors in the kitchen and among ancillary staff, plus the Dreaded Microbes carried on air currents, what I’ll contribute from driving and opening the restaurant door isn’t going to add much to the risk of contagion or ‘ick’ factor.
I generally figure out a way to exit the mens’ room door with my elbow or use paper towels to grasp the handle*, seeing that a high percentage of males are pigs** and don’t bother to wash their hands after using the facilities.
*pro tip for restaurants: place a waste basket close to the door so people can drop their paper towels in as they exit (as is the case in many hospital bathrooms). I’m pretty good at 3-point shooting with balled-up paper towels if the basket is located by the sink, but if I miss, it’s on you.
**through intelligence gathered from Mrs. J., it appears that women are frequently guilty of the same offense.
I wash my hands when I use the bathroom and in the shower. I certainly don’t go out of my way to wash my hands at the restaurant. It’ll most likely happen at a sit down restaurant if I have alcohol.
Most of the time, given where we live, restaurant dining involves sufficient travel time that I want to visit the restroom soon after arriving at the restaurant. So I wash my hands post-piss, pre-food.
On those less frequent occasions when we’re dining close by (usually fast food), I’ve hit the restroom and washed my hands before leaving the house. In those instances, given that my own car is the only place I’ve been in between washing my hands and sitting down in the restaurant, I feel that washing my hands at home has things covered, as long as I haven’t been coughing or blowing my nose on the way, in which case I’ll probably pull out the hand sanitizer.
I know that I should always wash. It’s simple common sense, good hygiene, good manners, etc etc etc. But I hardly ever actually do so (unless my hands feel yucky to some extent). Pure laziness. No excuses.
But thank you for making me feel terrible about it. I hope this will improve me. We’ll see.
I don’t wash my hands generally except after going to the bathroom No. 2, when showering or after doing work that gets them visibly dirty. Not generally because I touched stuff that could have germs. Maybe at some particularly grungy place I wouldn’t want to be in anyway, but not at a typical restaurant I’d go to. I also haven’t noticed a lot of people doing that.
Unless I’ve used the restroom too, I use hand sanitizer while waiting for food. I have a .5oz bottle that fits nicely in my purse. And, like JohnT the first thing I do when I get home is wash my hands. And if it turns out that coworkers have decided it’s bring-your-cold to work day, I wash my hands before and after using the restroom.
Some people will scoff and say that’s horribly germ-phobic, but they’re usually also the ones suffering through the 2-4 colds a year the average adult gets, whereas I average a cold about once every 18 to 24 months. I’m asthmatic, and I’d much rather be scoffed at than get a cold, which inevitably turns into 2-3 weeks of bronchitis, every three to six months.
Yes, because on the way to most restaurants I have touched many items: handholds and seats on public transit, the door to the restaurant, the menus given to me in the restaurant, and the table/seats where I’m sitting. I’m not a germaphobe, but it is now flu season, and my immune system is not the best because of diabetes. I also use hand sanitizer after doing my shopping or handling most things in a public setting.