Restaurant Emergency Procedures: A Guide for Waiters

Dear readers, hope you are all doing great. Today we will discuss about different restaurant emergency procedures and how you as a waiter or waitress or food server will handle those tricky situations very professionally and tactfully. You as a waiter or server hopefully will have a very long career. During this time you may have to handle few critical situations. You can be very careful about safety and take all the preventive measures and still may not be able to stop or prevent a storm or a kitchen fire or a blackout. The reality is nothing tells you in advance which guest is about to be injured or taken seriously ill. Go to the weekly staff meeting where these procedures get reviewed, so these preventive steps are discussed well before a dining room full of guests is watching you. When such incidents happens, your first responsibility then is to keep everyone calm and to keep panic and confusion from spreading through the room. You should work from a plan of action and the hope is that it keeps a bad situation from becoming a serious one. Always remember, each kind of crisis has its own response or needs to be handled differently. Among many here are few worth knowing:

Fire in the restaurant

Fire is an occupational hazard in any business that is built around a kitchen. In the NFPA figures FDNY publishes for operators from a 2010 to 2014, restaurants nationwide report about 7,500 structure fires a year and roughly $165 million in losses. Most of what prevents those fires is ordinary care on the floor. Open flames are handled carefully, whether that means a tableside dish or the votives on a four-top. Electrical equipment is kept in repair instead of run on a frayed cord. Ashtray contents are emptied into a fireproof container, never into a trash can with paper in it. Your own smoking habits belong on that list too.

Fires start anyway. It starts in a fryer vat or in wiring behind a wall. So the other half of the job is keeping order and starting the evacuation without waiting to see how bad it gets.

1. A cook or the manager on duty pulls the manual station by the kitchen exit when the fire is under the hood. That discharges the suppression system and cuts the gas and power to the appliances beneath it. The Class K extinguisher comes out after that, never before it.
2. Call 911 from a safe spot as soon as you are clear, and give the street address and where in the building the fire is. Use the restaurant phone only if it doesn’t hold up your own exit. Don’t assume the alarm panel already called them.
3. Keep guests calm and move them out along the posted evacuation routes. Close the door on the room the fire is in as you leave it, and don’t lock it.
4. Cover every exit so guests and coworkers get out and nobody walks back in for a coat or a phone.
5. Reassemble at the gathering point in the plan and count your section. Tell the firefighters who is missing.

Severe weather

Weather emergencies are always frightening. A dining room with a wall of glass facing the street must be the poor place to meet such. Its very obvious that we can’t control when or where severe weather lands, whether it arrives as a hurricane, straight-line winds, an earthquake, a snowstorm, or a tornado, but what we can do is that we can take necessary precautions that minimize the danger to people and property down.

Hurricanes and snowstorms give some notice, and management may decide to close so guests and staff can stay home. Of course, guests holding reservations have to be called about the closure, and that job usually falls to whoever is working the book. Lighter snow and rainstorms call for attention to slippery entrances instead. The entry mats and the tile inside the door turn slick as guests come in, and both should be watched and dried all shift. Rain and wind also keep guests at their tables longer.

One member of the staff should be assigned to follow a local station or NOAA Weather Radio through a storm. Such incidents need fast action from the floor. Learn the warning signals used in your area. A watch means conditions are right for tornadoes to form, and that is the moment to find out where your shelter is and who is covering the front door. The National Weather Service issues it when a tornado has been spotted or picked up on radar, and it means shelter now. Be ready to move the moment a siren sounds, and don’t wait for one if the alert has already reached you.

1. Help guests to shelter as soon as the warning is out.
2. Keep everyone inside. The parking lot and the cars in it are the worst place to be.
3. Take them to the basement, or to an interior room or hallway on the lowest floor, away from large windows. The kitchen, a back hallway, a restroom, or a centrally located stairwell all work. Keep them out of the dining room and any banquet space with a wide-span roof, along with anywhere enclosed in glass.
4. Get everyone low, crouched down with hands over the back of the head and neck. Coats and seat cushions help against flying debris.
5. Stay sheltered until the storm is over.

Earthquakes

As the Earthquakes give no warning at all, so the response has to be very much automatic. There is no announcement and no time to move anybody to a better spot. Here is what you should do:

1. Drop to your hands and knees where you are.
2. Get under a heavy table or a sturdy booth and hold on to a leg. With nothing to get under, go down against an interior wall away from the windows and cover your head and face with your arms, a tray, or a chair cushion. Skip the doorways in a modern building. A door frame is not stronger than the wall beside it and stops nothing that falls.
3. Warn guests away from the window glass and the panels along the front, the chandeliers and pendant lights, anything tall enough to topple, and loose brick around a fireplace.
4. Make sure, nobody takes the elevator, and nobody runs for the exit doors or the sidewalk. The front of a building is most dangerous because this is the place from where the glass and the facade come down.
5. Stay down until the shaking has clearly stopped, then check your section for injuries before anyone starts moving guests.
6. No match, no lighter, and no candle afterward, because of the possibility of a gas leak. Flashlights only.

Electrical blackouts

An electrical failure may be brief or last the rest of the night, and the two ask different things of you. For a short one, patience is most of the answer. Hold the tables and wait it out.

An outage that runs on is another matter. Guests are sitting in the dark at their tables and need enough light to finish a course or to reach the restroom and the door safely. Most public buildings have emergency lighting that comes on with the outage. It lights the exits rather than the tables.

If the emergency lighting stays dark or the room needs more than an exit path lit, give battery-powered lights rather than candles to the tables as fast as someone can carry them. Meanwhile, the manager on duty writes down the time the power went out and starts checking temperatures. Walk-in and reach-in doors stay shut, and cold food that has been above 41°F for more than four hours should be discarded.

Injury or serious illness

Injury and serious illness in a restaurant normally announce themselves as something out of place. Your senses as a waiter may do the work. Hearing, sight and smell – together may be helpful to understand or sense an emergency situation. Remain calm when a guest is seriously injured or becomes ill. Remember, the guest’s welfare comes ahead of the check and the rest of your section.

Knowing first aid may be valuable at a moment like that. That is why the whole staff, or at least one person on every shift, should be trained in first aid and personal safety. OSHA requires a trained first-aid provider where no infirmary, clinic, or hospital sits in near proximity to the workplace, along with adequate first aid supplies kept readily available. Trained servers should also know CPR and what to do for a guest who is conscious and choking. Skills should be reviewed every year, so responses stay automatic and techniques stay current. First aid here means the minor injuries and whatever holds a guest until medical personnel take over. The first-aid kit and the nonlatex gloves for injuries involving body fluids are kept where anyone on shift can reach them. The local emergency number or 911 is posted at every restaurant phone. Your restaurant manager or the restaurant’s insurer should be able to tell you what your state’s law covers.

This is what you should do in such situations:

1. Point to one coworker to call 911 while you and another server stay with the guest to comfort them and start first aid if it’s needed. If nobody else is close, make the call yourself on speakerphone. Here are some emergency signs like labored breathing or speech that has turned slurred, confused or halting. Few more signs are like a hand clutching the chest or throat, sweating with no clear cause, skin that has changed color or a guest who has become drowsy or confused for no reason you can find.
2. Don’t move a guest who is injured or seriously ill. The exceptions are immediate danger where they are, or a position that makes care impossible.
3. Get the manager on duty and the rest of the serving team over. Others stay with the guest, comfort them, and start first aid if it’s needed.
4. 2 or 3servers move the nearby tables as far from the incident as the room allows.
5. Ask the guest’s consent before you give first aid, and say what you are about to do. A guest who can’t answer has consented as far as the law is concerned, so don’t stand there waiting. Ask the parent first if a child is hurt, and where no parent or guardian is present, consent is implied and you give care.
6. For something less serious, offer to call paramedics or a doctor, and let the guest decide.

One server should document the incident for insurance and liability. Get the names and phone numbers of the guests who saw it happen, and write down what they say they saw.

Choking on food

Choking does happen in dining rooms. Normally choking happens from something big and dense, such as a large piece of steak. The guest may turn blue from lack of oxygen, stop speaking, and grab at the throat.

When a guest is conscious and the airway is not completely blocked, there is nothing for you to do but stay at the table and give support. Encourage them to keep coughing. In such panic situations, the biggest hope is that they cough hard enough to bring the food up on their own.

Coughing that doesn’t move it leaves a completely blocked airway, and the guest can’t cough, speak, or breathe. Work through these steps.

1. Tell a coworker to call 911 while you start. If you are the only one there, give care first and call right after.
2. Ask whether the guest is choking and get consent before you touch them. A nod is consent, and a guest who can’t answer has consented by law.
3. Give five back blows. Stand to the side and just behind the guest, put one arm across the chest for support, bend them forward at the waist, and strike five times between the shoulder blades with the heel of your hand.
4. Give five abdominal thrusts. Stand behind the guest and wrap your arms around the waist, put the thumb side of your fist against the middle of the abdomen just above the navel, grasp the fist with your other hand, and thrust five times quickly and upward.
5. Keep alternating five back blows and five abdominal thrusts until the food comes out or the guest goes unresponsive.
6. Use chest thrusts instead of abdominal thrusts for a pregnant guest, or for one you can’t get your arms around. Put your hands at the base of the breastbone, just above where the lowest ribs join, and thrust straight in.
7. For an infant under a year, lay the baby face-down along your forearm with the head lower than the body and give five back blows between the shoulder blades with the heel of your hand. Turn the baby face-up, still head-down, and give five chest thrusts with the heel of one hand on the breastbone just below the nipple line. Abdominal thrusts are never used on an infant.
8. Keep your fingers out of the mouth. A sweep through a mouth where you can’t see the object pushes it deeper.
9. Lower a guest who goes unresponsive to the floor and start CPR. Look in the mouth before each set of breaths and take out an object only when you can see it.

After the food is out, the guest should be checked by a healthcare provider before going home. Be sure someone is watching the guest’s belongings through all of it. Possessions such as purses, parcels, and coats should be put somewhere safe until the guest has recovered.

Respect and liability after the incident

Emergency situations are very hard to handle but always remember, an emergency is one of the few rare opportunities when a dining room full of guests watches exactly how you work and a steady, professional response in such situations, leaves their respect intact. It also decides where the restaurant stands if a lawsuit follows. In a lawsuit, you stand a better chance when you’ve worked to prevent accidents all along and shown consideration to every guest and coworker during an injury or other emergency.