The Germiest Spot In A Restaurant Is Likely Lurking Right Beneath Your Nose

Going out to eat should be a treat, but we never know how clean the restaurant’s ice dispenser is or if the person preparing our food has washed their hands recently ― and that can mean trouble.

Even though germs are everywhere and most of them are harmless, some of them can make us sick. So if there are simple strategies to stay safer when we’re dining out, why not use them?

That’s why we ― Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, hosts ofHuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast ― asked microbiologistJason Tetro, aka “The Germ Guy,” to brief us on what might be lurking at our tables and in the kitchens of even the fanciest restaurants.

Listen to the full episode by pressing play on the player:

During our chat, we learned what to avoid when we’re ordering from the bar, the dirty truth about the “five-second rule” and the number one germiest part of the restaurant.

A few years ago, “I was going around to different places in the city, and I was looking for the germiest items, and when I would go into restaurants, it was always the menus,” Tetro told us.

“The reason for that… was that the menus themselves were not so dirty, it was the cloth that they used to clean the menus,” he said.

Too often menus are cleaned using dirty cloths, which spread the germs from one item to the next, or the cleaning products don’t have time to be effective.

“You can use a detergent, you can use a disinfectant, and that’s great, right? But if you spray it into the cloth, well, you’ve just disinfected your cloth, and, yeah, you’ve maybe disinfected a small area of the cloth while the rest of it is still germy,” Tetro, the author of“The Germ Files”and“The Germ Code,”explained. “What you really need to be doing is you need to be taking that