Food, drink, a warm spot for lingering: What makes restaurants so appealing to humans also makes them appealing to rodents and other creatures—the sight of which can send even the most stalwart guests scurrying.

“The key element for successful pest control is prevention,” says Juan Carlos Banderas, director of quality assurance for Atlanta-based Focus Brands. Focus—parent company of operations as diverse as Moe’s Southwest Grill and Cinnabon—works with a national pest-control company to keep critters at bay. For its part, Focus emphasizes the development and execution in each of its units of thorough sanitation procedures. The mission? “Serving wholesome, healthy and safe food to our guests,” Banderas says.

After every shift, the kitchen staff at Il Mito, a 50-seat restaurant with an attached cooking school in Wauwatosa, Wis., brooms and mops the entire back of the house.

Then, before closing for the night, the staff pulls each piece of equipment (all equipment is set on casters) away from the wall and cleans behind it. “You get behind those and you mop, degrease and broom,” says Chef-owner Michael Feker. “That’s where (the pests) come from. They’ll never be where you can see them.”

The oven door and burner grids also are degreased every night. Feker lines burner pans with aluminum foil and discards the foil nightly; once a week he takes apart the top of the stove and soaks all of the parts in degreaser. He also vacuums the oven’s crumb chamber with a kitchen-dedicated wet-dry vacuum. “They love the oven and what’s underneath,” he says of the pests kept at bay. “It’s warm and there are food droppings.”

Feker says the staff doesn’t grumble about the cleaning, which takes about an hour per night. “Delegation of cleaning is an essential part of success in this industry,” Feker says, adding that “nobody likes to work in a kitchen with mice and rats running around.”

A national pest-control company visits Il Mito once a month. On choosing such a company, Feker advises, “Do not search for value—there’s no such thing as value in this business.” Look for warranties, and be willing to pay a little more for those who offer them, he says.

Pests don’t confine their stay to food-rich kitchens. That’s why The Glass Cactus, a 1,650-seat nightclub and restaurant in Dallas, set up an invisible mosquito “net” around its patio.

The 39,000-square-foot club is built on stilts planted into Lake Grapevine. This places it squarely above water, an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes and aquatic midges. The club is adjacent to untended land, which also is an undisturbed breeding ground for a multitude of bugs.

Several times each day, the perimeter of the club’s patio and decks is misted with an eco-friendly spray of botanical oils. The spray is stored in 55-gallon below-ground drums. A digital control panel helps control the time and strength of the mistings.

The spray kills not only mosquitoes but also their larvae and pupae, making the club a so-called “free zone” of infestation. “It’s preventive at this point,” says Tonie Roberts, general manager for The Glass Cactus. The club leases the system for about $185 a month, and the provider visits the club once a week to monitor the drums and make sure everything is functional.

Roberts says that the system is problem-free, as it leaves no residue on furniture and produces no odor. “It’s a silent helper—it’s just there,” Roberts says.

If pests can’t enter an operation, they won’t be a problem. That was the thinking behind the engineering at the new 160-seat Aspire Restaurant in the Hotel Providence in Providence, R.I.

The building’s engineers inspected the outside of the building for holes and accesses, then filled them with concrete or breathable corking that mice can’t chew through. They also made sure that stripping on the bottom of doors was secure, sealed around pipes, and doubled up on mousetraps. “We are cutting off their means of transportation from floor to floor,” says Dennis Sullivan, chief engineer for the 80-room Hotel Providence.

The measures effectively ended the building’s minor mouse problem, Sullivan says. “We had some sightings in the beginning but not since then,” he says.

It helps greatly that Aspire Executive Chef Jennis Heal and his staff keep an immaculate kitchen. “The key is a real clean floor, corner to corner,” Heal says. A crew thoroughly scours the floor seven days a week. Other measures include ensuring that the receiving door is open only as long as necessary. “That’s how (pests) get in,” Heal says.

Atlanta-based Focus Brands relies on professionals to keep its restaurants pest-free.

The company’s brands, Carvel Ice Cream, Cinnabon, Schlotzsky’s and Moe’s Southwest Grill, are under contract with a national extermination firm. Most restaurants receive monthly visits from the firm, although locations in New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco get twice-monthly treatment. Services provided include termination and control of roaches, ants, silverfish, rats, mice, pavement ants, crickets, millipedes, centipedes and sow bugs. If there is a problem, the contract calls for the firm to retreat the location at no extra cost.

Focus encourages franchisees to use the company by including it on a list of approved vendors. Additionally, the company posts information about the pest-control firm on each concept’s intranet site. Juan Carlos Banderas, director of quality assurance for Focus Brands, wouldn’t disclose the annual per-store extermination-service fee.

Effective pest-management programs are relentlessly thorough; here are 10 components.

• Check all shipments for signs of pests, rejecting those that show such signs.
• Cover vents and windows with 16-mesh-per-square-inch screening.
• Install self-closing devices and door sweeps on exterior doors.
• Fill holes around pipes with concrete or cover with sheet metal.
• Cover floor drains with hinged grates. Rats swim well and can enter through drainpipes.
• Remove trash often, placing it in covered outdoor containers.
• Hold recyclable cans and bottles (rinsed first) in clean, pest-proof containers.
• Keep the area around the outdoor refuse area clean.
• Store food and supplies away from walls and at least 6 inches from the floor.
• Require employees to keep locker rooms and break rooms immaculate.

Source: ServSafe Essentials, Fifth Edition