India, Sept. 4 -- I used to think the most important thing to know about a restaurant was whether I liked it or not. This now seems naive. Apparently, I should also know whether its refrigerator works, whether the kitchen has pests, whether the ingredients have expired, and whether the chef has recently been introduced to the concept of food safety. There are many ways to establish that you are eating somewhere expensive. The lighting is flattering. The chairs are uncomfortable in a manner that suggests Italian design. Someone has placed a single flower on the table, preferably one that appears to have been flown in. The menu contains the word 'curated'. Your water arrives in a bottle whose label is more recognisable than some political parties. Increasingly, however, there is another luxury worth looking for - a clean kitchen. Across Indian cities, restaurants have been facing greater scrutiny from food-safety authorities, with inspections uncovering the usual assortment of culinary horrors: expired ingredients, improper storage, pest infestations, inadequate refrigeration and the occasional reminder that the phrase 'farm-to-table' tells you absolutely nothing about where the farm ends and the refrigerator begins. It is an uncomfortable development for an industry that has spent the better part of the last decade perfecting the visible side of dining, while the kitchen, for the most part, remains somewhere behind a door. This is outlandish because we have become obsessed with transparency in almost every other part of contemporary dining. We want to know the chef's childhood. We want to know the farmer who grew the carrots. We want to know whether the olive oil is single-estate and whether the salt was harvested by someone who has strong opinions about the sea. It turns out that a restaurant can have a ceramicist making bespoke plates, a bartender hand-carving one enormous piece of ice and a chef explaining the philosophical journey of a pea, while somewhere in the back, a refrigerator is having a nervous breakdown. But we rarely ask the more basic questions. We tend to assume that price is a proxy for standards. A Rs.5,000 dinner feels as though it ought to come with a guarantee that the kitchen is cleaner than your own. But food safety is stubbornly democratic. Bacteria do not care about the neighbourhood. Salmonella has no interest in whether the restaurant has a celebrity chef. Cross-contamination is unimpressed by marble countertops. An expensive tasting menu is still, biologically speaking, just food. Perhaps that is what makes the recent crackdowns so revealing. They have introduced an unusually undignified vocabulary into India's increasingly glamorous restaurant culture. We are used to hearing about fermentation, provenance, sustainability and zero-waste kitchens. Now we are hearing about pests, and there is something almost revolutionary about it. For years, restaurants have competed to make diners feel that they are entering a rarefied world. But the next status symbol will be something much less visible - a restaurant that takes hygiene seriously. So perhaps the next time a restaurant tells us about its imported marble, its rare whisky, its chef's 12-stage tasting menu or its 'immersive' dining experience, we should remember that the most important room is the one we are probably not being shown. After all, the best luxury is not being impressed by what you can see. It is knowing you don't have to worry about what you can't. The author of this article is a graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in New York. She is an independent society and culture writer exploring the intersections of modern etiquette, wealth, urban life, and the subtle absurdities of contemporary culture...