From our friends at Pancake PlayHouse:
I'm the kitchen manager for Pancake Playhouse. I can give you a rundown of the steps we take to meet code. We have evolved to this point from a pretty crappy kitchen that probably should have been shut down in 2001 to what we are today (still pretty budget, but functional.) I don't know how much detail you want, or how much of this will apply to you, but here is everything we do.
Our kitchen is made up of 2 carports, we got ours from Costco, but lots of places have them. We carpet the floor, and spike the carpet down with those crappy little tent stakes that no one uses out on the playa, just stake the edges of each piece of carpet down about every 4 or 5 feet. This reduces dust. We have a couple of large fans to circulate air in there so we don't get too hot.
We store our dry food on shelves to keep it up off the floor, we place these shelves on the windward side of the kitchen, this helps secure the structure.
We have 4 large trash barrels, one each for aluminum, trash, glass, and burnables. These are staked down and attached to the structure support poles on the windward side. We use heavy duty contractor's bags instead of trash bags, as even the strongest trash bags will tear under the kind of stress the playa puts on plastic, but contractor's bags are a lot tougher. You can find them at any good hardware store. When a bag is full we tie it shut and tie it to the outside of the kitchen on the leeward side.
Our washing, cooking, prep, and serving are all done on large 30"X72" folding tables, four for cooking, 1 each for prep, serving, and dish washing.
The dishwashing table is located on the leeward side of the kitchen. We use 3 shallow sealable storage tubs for our dishwashing. One for washing, one for rinsing, and one for bleach sanitizing. For the sanitizer use the gnarly chlorine bleach, we used the environmentally friendly seventh generation stuff one year and got dinged for improperly sanitizing our dishes. You can get basic litmus paper from a restaurant supply store to test the ph of your sanitizer. We use a simple wooden shelf above the tubs to hold 2.5 gallon water jugs to serve as spigots. Once the dishes are dry we pack them away in large sealable storage tubs.
Next to the dishwashing station we have a hand washing station. It is just a 2.5 gallon jug of water with a small tub underneath it to catch the runoff. We have liquid soap and hand sanitizer gel. We keep a nail brush in a bowl of relatively high ph bleach water. We had a paper towel roll from the kitchen wall above the station.
The prep, cooking and serving tables are cleaned before and after each shift. After each shift all of the stoves are cleaned and stacked. Before each shift we give them a quick wipe down to get all the dust that they accumulated off.
The serving area has syrup jugs with pump tops and at least one of us serving the pancakes using tongs and wearing gloves.
You are not allowed to have open beverage containers for people working in the kitchen, but sport top bottles are acceptable so we makes sure to put one by each stove, so that the cooks can stay hydrated without breaking the rules. We also make our people take frequent breaks, as it can get hot in there.
Every one in the kitchen has to be wearing a hat or hairnet and some sort of clothing that covers the front of their body.
We have at least one runner to take the food from the cooks to the servers, this keeps the food flowing quickly.
We have one person whose job it is to deal with the health inspector each day, they probably won't come every day, but they might, so we pick someone that refrained from heavy extra-curricular activities the previous night so that they are relatively fresh and coherent. If you have volunteer cooks, make sure they don't talk to the health inspectors.
We don't serve food that requires refrigeration, but we cook it for ourselves, if you need to keep food cold using only ice chests, make sure the chests stay in the shade. If you are using a refrigerator I would suggest putting it on a dolly so you can roll it into the shade as needed. It will keep the compressor from getting over worked, well no it won't, but it might make the compressor last the week. I have never had a fridge survive a trip to the playa, but if you have access to one you are going to toss anyway I highly recommend taking it up there.
You get the permit application here http://health.nv.gov/PDFs/TempApp.pdf
This is a helpful checklist, if you answer yes to all the questions you will pass your inspections. http://health.nv.gov/PDFs/SelfInsp.pdf
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