The inspector does not phone ahead. They walk in during service, on your busiest day, and they work through a checklist you have never seen.
Most venue owners meet that checklist for the first time in the form of a penalty notice. By then it is public. The NSW Food Authority Name and Shame register lists your business, your address and what you were fined for, and it stays there for twelve months where every customer with a search engine can find it.
We work the other side of that. We run the inspection before the council does, against the same criteria, and we tell you what would have failed.
Send us photos. We will tell you what fails.
Take photos on your phone of your coolroom, your dry store and your prep bench. Email them to us. Within 48 hours you get a written list of what an authorised officer would write up, ranked by how likely it is to attract a penalty notice.
Free. No call required. No obligation. You keep the report either way.
Email your photos to wayne@pestleandmortar.com.au
Six or seven photos is plenty. Include your temperature record sheet if you have one to hand. If you have already been served a notice, photograph that too and we will read it for you.
Wayne writes these himself, so there is a limit to how many we can turn around. If it takes longer than 48 hours, that is why.
What we actually do
Mock council inspection
We walk your venue the way an authorised officer walks it. Temperature records, cooling processes, chemical storage, pest evidence, hand wash access, cleaning schedules, structural condition, labelling, allergen handling and staff practice. You get a written report listing every item that would attract a penalty notice, ranked by how likely it is to be picked up and how much it would cost you.
Not a generic checklist. Your kitchen, your equipment, your menu.
Food safety programs
If you handle potentially hazardous food for vulnerable people, or you are a licensed caterer, a food safety program is not optional. We write one that matches how your kitchen genuinely operates, rather than a template that gets filed in a drawer and never opened. A program your staff cannot follow is worse than no program at all, because it proves you knew what you were supposed to do.
After a failed inspection
You have been served an improvement notice, a penalty notice, or a prohibition order. There is a clock running and the wording is deliberately unhelpful.
We read the notice, work out what the officer actually wants to see, fix the underlying cause rather than the symptom, and prepare you for the re-inspection. Where a matter is worth contesting, we tell you. Where it is not, we tell you that too and get you compliant instead.
Staff training that survives a Tuesday
Your Food Safety Supervisor certificate satisfies the requirement. It does not change what happens at 7pm when the kitchen is behind and someone puts a hot stockpot straight in the coolroom. We train on the handful of behaviours that actually cause failures, in your kitchen, on your equipment.
Why venues fail
After thirty years in kitchens, the same items come up again and again. Almost none of them are dramatic.
- Temperature records that are filled in on Friday for the whole week. Inspectors know what that looks like.
- Cooling. The two stage cooling rule is the single most commonly breached requirement in the state and most kitchens have no way of proving they meet it.
- Hand wash basins used as prep sinks, or blocked, or with no soap and no paper towel.
- Chemicals stored above or beside food. Thirty seconds to fix. A penalty notice if it is seen.
- Pest evidence in areas nobody looks at, behind the ice machine, under the dish pit, inside the dry store shelving.
- No documented allergen process, which is now the fastest growing area of enforcement in NSW.
None of these are about caring less. They are about a system that was built for a quieter venue and never updated.
Who this is for
Restaurants, cafes, bars, caterers, bakeries, food trucks, aged care and childcare kitchens, dark kitchens and multi site groups across Greater Sydney and regional New South Wales.
Three situations bring people to us:
- You have just been inspected and it did not go well.
- You know you are due, and you would rather find the problems yourself.
- You are opening, and you want the systems right before day one rather than retrofitted after the first visit.
What you get
- A written report, plain English, no jargon, listing every finding with a photograph.
- Each item ranked critical, major or minor, so you know what to fix today and what can wait.
- The specific clause each finding relates to, so there is no argument about whether it matters.
- A corrective action plan with realistic timeframes for a working kitchen.
- Templates and records that your staff will actually use.
- A follow up call once you have worked through it.
Why us
We are not auditors who have read about kitchens. Pestle and Mortar was built by operators. Thirty years running restaurants, catering companies and multi site food businesses, which means we know the difference between a rule and a rule that a real kitchen can keep on a Saturday night.
That matters, because compliance advice that ignores service is advice that gets abandoned in week two.
Talk to us
Thirty minutes, free, phone or video. You do not need to prepare anything. Start with whatever is worrying you, whether that is a notice on your desk or just a feeling that you would not survive a surprise visit.
If you have just been served a notice and the clock is running, phone us on 0420 862 490.