Stricter safety controls at Beijing's high-end restaurants means more paperwork for overworked chef Zhang Jingan.

As if he didn't have enough on his plate already.

"At first we weren't used to doing so much paperwork every day," said Zhang, who has prepared Chinese food at the Grand Hotel Beijing for 17 years but has only recently been ordered to keep meticulous notebooks recording his operations.

"But now we are getting used to it. We understand we have to be more strict in terms of our cooking routines to maintain high quality standards."

The Grand Hotel is among a wave of restaurants in the capital tasked with upgrading their working conditions to meet international standards ahead of the Beijing Games.

"To meet the requirements of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), we have made key reforms in the way we work in the kitchen," Xia Minhui, the hotel's food and beverage director, told China Daily.

The Chinese-style boutique hotel adjacent to the Forbidden City will become one of the homes to IOC officials, Olympic Family members and Olympic sponsors during the Games. It will provide some 170 rooms and host press conferences.

"It is a big challenge for us to cater to so many distinguished guests for that length of time," said Xia.

Her department is responsible for ensuring that guests enjoy food that not only meets international health standards, but also covers a range of local cuisines with Chinese characteristics.

The hotel hopes that introducing the HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) program into its daily operations will sufficiently upgrade its service.

HACCP is a systematic preventive approach to food safety, which identifies potential food safety hazards, so that key actions, known as Critical Control Points (CCP's) can be taken to reduce or eliminate the risk of the hazards being realized. The system is used at all stages of food production and preparation.

In order to qualify, the kitchen staff has had to make professional and even psychological changes to the way they work, as chef Zhang has found out.

Now Zhang and his colleagues have to record every detail about hundreds of Chinese ingredients, dishes and even cooking methods, including their shelf life, cooking time and the temperatures used.

"In traditional Chinese cooking, chefs don't follow very strict rules but depend more on their experience and feelings, so it is quite hard to control the overall quality of Chinese food," said Xia.

"After introducing the HACCP system, every kitchen at our hotel has at least two big notebooks recording their daily operations."

A quality control lab in the basement of the hotel tests samples of the food and dishware every day, while lab officials randomly drop by to check what is going on at the restaurants and kitchens.

"We do at least 80 tests every week to ensure our food materials are safe and our tableware is clean," said Quality Assurance Office Manager Li Baoguo.

"Because of the poor air quality in Beijing, we require that no tableware be exposed to the open air for more than half an hour."

Mission: Possible

The hotel passed the HACCP verification tests on June 15 but Xia's department still gets surprise spot checks from the verifying organization.

"We must keep the program running at the same level otherwise we will lose the HACCP certificate," said Xia.

Beijing Health Bureau recently inspected 21,000 restaurants out of 35,000 in the city and graded them on food safety. About 1,596 met the Grade A level, the highest standard, while 735 failed to qualify for food safety standards.

As for the 351 restaurants within the 113 Olympic-contracted hotels, the bureau said all of them must meet the Grade A standard before the Games.