Lately, something about restaurants stinks. Ironically, it’s a cleaning product.
There are many smells that I love greeting me when I enter a restaurant: the warmth of freshly sautéed garlic, the gentle nose-sting of peppers charring, or the salty breeze of steaming clams. I hesitate to name off the smells I do not love to be greeted by, but lately, one in particular has assaulted my senses increasingly often.
Fabuloso.
The lavender-tinged scent of this multipurpose cleaner, originally developed in Venezuela, reminds me of walking into friends’ homes in Mexico, where it’s widely used. But when wielded on a commercial scale, such as the dining room of a restaurant, the harsh, sharp components fill the room and violate my nostrils. It smells clean, which is great, but it also makes my food taste clean. Or, rather, like cleaner.
In the past, I’ve noticed it in the occasional Mexican restaurant—annoying, but at least understandable for nostalgia and accessibility reasons, if nothing else. In the last year, though, use of it has spread exponentially in the Seattle area. I’ve noticed it at many more restaurants, at restaurants of all sorts.
Plenty of cleaning products have scents, but only Fabuloso seems to penetrate deep into my brain, dominating my senses to the point that all food starts to taste as if it’s been seasoned with Fabuloso. Spaghetti alla soap; fried chicken with chemical sauce; synthetic lavender and lunch meat sandwich.
Even worse, as I began to dig into why this is happening, I learned something new: Despite its strong smell, Fabuloso is not a strong product. The professional version, like the home version, is an all-purpose cleaner, not a sanitizer or disinfectant. Those floors and tables look, feel, and (sigh) smell clean, but they are likely less clean than a place using a traditional neutral-scented cleaner.
I appreciate the commitment to cleanliness and understand the emotional attachment to the smell—both for people who grew up with the scent and those who appreciate the reassurance of a “clean” smell upon entering a restaurant. But restaurants should smell like the food their cooks spent hours toiling over in the kitchen, and that food should not taste like lavender-infused mop water.