The City of Fairfax runs itself separately from the county, but restaurant inspections inside the city are done by the Fairfax County Health Department, so your kitchen is held to the same rules as every other one in the county.
What gets checked on your coolers
Virginia follows the FDA Food Code. Cold food has to hold at 41 F or below, and the inspector checks with a probe in the food itself. A wall dial reading 38 doesn’t help much if the chicken on the top shelf probes at 43. Freezers are expected at 0 F or colder.
Expect them to look for a working thermometer in each unit, and maybe to ask how you track temperatures. If you keep logs, spend ten minutes with our guide to reading temperature logs, since a unit that’s going to fail often drifts in the log for weeks first.
Ice is food as far as the code is concerned. Pink or black slime inside the bin or around the evaporator can get written up, and our post on ice machine slime explains what that buildup is and how it comes out.
Units that slip at lunch
A borderline cooler can read fine at 8 a.m. and creep up once the kitchen’s hot and the doors are opening every minute. If your log only has morning readings, you might never catch it. Take a reading in the middle of the rush for a week. A unit that climbs past 41 then usually has a dirty condenser coil, a tired fan motor or a gasket that’s stopped sealing, and you’d much rather fix any of those before an inspector finds the unit at 44. There’s a longer checklist in getting ready for an inspection.
After a repair, the tech leaves a service report listing what failed and what was replaced, with temperatures before and after. File it with your logs.
We cover 22030 through 22033: Old Town, the George Mason side, Route 50 and Route 123, and the Fair Oaks Mall area. The rest of Fairfax County is the same phone call.
