Nutritional Quality Analysis of Vegetable Pulav served at Selected Restaurants

Introduction Total food quality management has been a hard challenge for all the restaurateurs since long. Consistent quality is critical for hospitality operations. It is a hard reality that the food served at restaurants is generally high in calories, fats and carbohydrates thereby leading to malnutrition and other health related disorders like overweight, obesity, heart diseases etc. on prolonged regular consumption. This food however generally lacks in certain essential nutrients like proteins, vitamins and minerals thus causing greater imbalance.

Objectives The study was carried out with the following objectives:
 To calculate the proximate composition of Vegetable Pulav served at selected restaurants
 To evaluate the nutritional adequacy of Vegetable Pulav served thereto

Methodology The vegetable pulav samples were procured from private, public and fast food restaurants in a sterile ice box. Development of the standardized recipe and proximate composition analysis were performed to evaluate energy, carbohydrate, protein, fats, fibre, ash and moisture content. The proximate values were calculated in triplicate. The mean scores of the triplicates and standard deviation were calculated using SPSS 16.0 version.

Results and Conclusion Vegetable pulav served at most of the studied restaurants was found to be deficient in almost all the calculated nutrients especially calories and fibre with reference to the standardized recipe. The vegetable pulav of private restaurants (R1) was higher only in carbohydrate (9 per cent) whereas that served at fast food restaurants (R3) rated higher in protein (7 per cent) and fat contents (15 per cent). However, a total decline has been noted in energy (- 41 per cent), carbohydrate (- 1.5 per cent), protein (-29 per cent), fat (-6 per cent) and fibre (-17 per cent) content of the vegetable pulav served at public restaurants (R2).