Restaurant Cleaning Checklist Template

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Maintain a spotless and sanitary environment with detailed restaurant cleaning checklist templates. Covering everything from kitchen hygiene to dining area upkeep, they ensure that your restaurant meets health standards and provides a welcoming atmosphere. Available for free in PDF or in-app.

Restaurant cleaning checklists are crucial for maintaining a spotless and hygienic environment in your establishment. They ensure that every area is cleaned thoroughly and consistently, reducing the risk of contamination and enhancing the dining experience. It helps streamline cleaning tasks, ensures compliance with health standards, and boosts staff accountability. Restaurant cleaning checklists can help you maintain a clean and welcoming environment for both staff and customers.

Key components of effective restaurant cleaning checklists include:

Focus on high-touch areas like menus, door handles, and condiment stations.
Ensure countertops, tables, and kitchen surfaces are disinfected after each use.
Regular sweeping and mopping to prevent spills and debris accumulation.
Daily inspection and cleaning of kitchen appliances to ensure they operate efficiently.
Proper disposal of garbage and regular emptying of trash bins to avoid odors and pests

With the GoAudits Restaurant Operations App, you can:

Kitchen

Bathrooms

Seating Area

Laundry

Balcony / Deck

Safety

Effective

Caring

Responsive

Smart inspection app for your digital checklists

What is a Restaurant Cleaning Checklist?

With so many tasks to manage in a restaurant—like meal preparation, serving customers, and ensuring excellent customer service—cleaning activities can sometimes be overlooked.

Restaurant cleaning checklists are comprehensive documents designed to help staff systematically maintain cleanliness and hygiene across all areas of a restaurant. They outline a range of tasks from daily surface wipes to weekly deep cleans and monthly maintenance checks, covering kitchens, dining areas, restrooms, and storage rooms. These checklists specify cleaning tasks, their frequency, responsible staff members, and required supplies, ensuring that no area is overlooked.

By detailing these processes, they help prevent cross-contamination and health hazards, ensure compliance with regulations, and establish standardized cleaning protocols across all locations and shifts.

Who needs Restaurant Cleaning Checklists?

Restaurant cleaning checklists are helpful tools for many different teams:

Restaurant Owners and Managers: Restaurant cleaning checklists provide a structured approach to maintaining cleanliness, ensuring compliance with health regulations, and reducing the risk of fines or closures. They also assist in managing staff duties and tracking cleaning activities to uphold high standards.
Kitchen Staff: Restaurant kitchen cleaning checklists help kitchen staff comply with critical daily cleaning tasks, such as sanitizing surfaces and equipment, which is crucial for preventing cross-contamination and maintaining food safety.
Front-of-House Staff: For servers and hosts, a restaurant cleaning checklist guides the upkeep of dining areas and restrooms, enhancing the dining experience and supporting positive customer reviews.
Cleaning Staff: When a restaurant relies on a dedicated cleaning team, whether in-house or external, a cleaning checklist is essential. It ensures that the cleaning staff is fully aware of all required protocols and follows them consistently.
Health Inspectors: Health inspectors often use these restaurant cleaning checklists as a benchmark during inspections.

How to make it easier for my team to maintain compliance with cleaning tasks?

In a busy restaurant, it’s challenging for staff to keep the kitchen and guest areas consistently clean while remembering every detail. That’s why finding an efficient way to assist your team without adding to their workload is crucial.

A practical approach is to organize cleaning tasks by frequency, location and/or cleaning type. Below are some examples:

Restaurant Deep Cleaning Checklists

Ensuring the highest standards of cleanliness in your restaurant is vital for both hygiene and customer satisfaction. A daily deep cleaning inspection involves meticulous tasks like sanitizing processing surfaces, cleaning hard-to-reach floor areas, and disinfecting high-touch points such as door handles and taps. Attention to detail extends to walls, ceilings, and light fixtures, ensuring no area is overlooked. Get started with one of these templates:

Restaurant Kitchen Cleaning Checklists

A comprehensive kitchen cleaning checklist covers tasks like cleaning and sanitizing food processing surfaces, shelves, and equipment after each use, scrubbing floors, walls, and ceilings, and maintaining the cleanliness of extractor hoods, grease traps, and basins. Regular checks of dishwashers, manual wash areas, and cold storage units ensure all equipment is kept in optimal condition. Get started with one of these templates:

Commercial Kitchen Cleaning Checklist

A commercial kitchen cleaning checklist can be used to ensure all cleaning and sanitation requirements are followed in commercial kitchens. It includes a comprehensive list of daily cleaning tasks, such as properly storing dishes and utensils, checking and completing HACCP files and food temperatures, sanitizing sinks and work counters, cleaning the can opener and steam table, and ensuring proper waste disposal. It also covers aspects like wearing hair restraints and clean clothing and keeping hands clean and free from infections.

Bar Cleaning Checklists

A bar cleaning checklist covers tasks such as wiping down counters, cleaning and sanitizing glassware, disinfecting high-touch surfaces, emptying trash bins, cleaning beer taps, and ensuring that all equipment is properly maintained. This checklist helps staff stay organized and ensures that every aspect of the bar meets health and safety standards.

Other Restaurant Operation & Hygiene Checklists

You can also incorporate cleaning tasks into broader operational and food safety checklists, covering areas like receiving, storage, food preparation, waste disposal or opening/closing. This approach ensures that cleanliness is maintained alongside other critical procedures.

👉 Use the GoAudits app to create and manage your own digital checklists

GoAudits makes it easy to improve your operational standards with customized checklists:

Create an account for free, choose from 100s of hospitality templates, customize them as needed. Alternatively, build your own from scratch with a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface. Or send us your checklist and we will digitize it for you!
Conduct inspections up to 5X faster on any device, even when you’re offline
Generate professional, ready-to-be-shared reports instantly after each inspection
Assign corrective actions and view task completion status in a centralized dashboard
Get a complete overview of your audit scores across multiple locations, teams, or topics

Benefits of using Digital Restaurant Cleaning Checklists?

Let’s look at the key benefits of using digital restaurant cleaning checklists.

Improved Accountability & Compliance

Digital checklists standardize cleaning tasks and allow to track who completed which tasks and when. This ensures every corner of the restaurant is consistently maintained to high standards, enhancing hygiene and food safety compliance.

Full Visibility

With digital reports and smart dashboards, managers can monitor cleaning activities in real-time, along with all other operational tasks and checks. This helps restaurant managers in their supervision tasks, and to spot & correct any issues as they occur.

Enhanced Efficiency

Automated reminders and streamlined processes save time, allowing staff to focus on providing excellent service without compromising cleanliness.

Easy Updates and Customization

Digital restaurant cleaning checklists can be quickly updated to reflect new regulations or restaurant-specific requirements.

Environmentally Friendly

Switching to digital checklists reduces paper waste, supporting sustainability efforts and lowering operational costs.

Comprehensive Documentation and Reporting

Digital restaurant cleaning checklists provide detailed records of cleaning activities, useful for audits and inspections.

Increased Employee Engagement

Step-by-step instructions and user-friendly digital checklists can improve staff engagement and adherence to cleaning protocols.

👉 Learn more about the GoAudits app for restaurant operations, quality & compliance

Other Popular Restaurant Checklists:

Restaurant Operations Checklist App

Easily perform audits anywhere in the facility using a mobile device.
Capture and attach photos as proof of compliance or areas needing attention.
Assign tasks, set deadlines, and track progress, all within a single app
Analyze data from audits to identify trends, pinpoint recurring issues, and assess compliance levels.

Restaurant Cleaning Checklist Template

1. Has the oven interior as well as exterior been degreased and cleaned?

2. Has the stovetop been degreased and cleaned?

3. Have the extractor hood and filters been degreased and cleaned?

4. Have the bench tops, drawers, shelves and doors been cleaned?

5. Have cupboards been cleaned inside and outside?

6. Has the dishwasher been cleaned - inside, outside and filters?

7. Has the dishwasher been pulled out to wipe and clean the top, behind and the floors underneath?

8. Have the sinks and taps been cleaned and polished?

9. Has the backsplash been wiped and polished?

10. Has the kickboard been buffed and scuff marks removed?

11. Have the interior and exterior of the oven been degreased and cleaned?

12. Has all dust and cobwebs been removed?

13. Have all light fittings been dusted and wiped both inside and out?

14. Have all power points and light switches been cleaned?

15. Have all air conditioners including filters been cleaned?

16. Have all shelves been dusted and wiped; scuff marks removed?

17. Have window and door tracks been cleaned?

18. Were window and door screens dusted?

19. Have the insides of windows been washed?

20. Have window frames/sills and door frames been dusted and wiped?

21. Have skirting boards been dusted and wiped; scuff marks removed?

22. Were doors and door frames cleaned?

23. Were blinds dusted and cleaned?

24. Have walls been spot cleaned or washed?

25. Were hard surface floors vacuumed and mopped?

26. Was high dusting completed?

27. Have all the kitchen counter appliances been cleaned inside and out? (e.g. Toaster, coffee maker, microwave, etc.)

1. Were basins, taps and plug hole cleaned and polished?

2. Have cupboards been cleaned inside and out?

3. Were shelves and drawers cleaned with any marks removed?

4. Have mirrors been cleaned and polished?

5. Were sills and tiles cleaned?

6. Any mould or build-up removed appropriately?

7. Drain holes and plug holes cleaned?

8. Were toilet bowl and seat disinfected and cleaned inside and outside?

9. Were exhaust fans cleaned?

10. Have light fittings been dusted and wiped inside and out?

11. Were power points and light switches cleaned?

12. Were air conditioners including filters cleaned?

13. Were shelves dusted and wipe; any scuff marks removed?

14. Have window and door tracks been cleaned?

15. Were window and door screens dusted?

16. Have the insides of windows been washed?

17. Have window frames/sills and door frames been dusted and wiped?

18. Have skirting boards been dusted and wiped; scuff marks removed?

19. Were doors and door frames cleaned?

20. Were blinds dusted and cleaned?

21. Have walls been spot cleaned or washed?

22. Were hard surface floors vacuumed and mopped?

23. Was high dusting completed?

1. Has all dust and cobwebs been removed?

2. Have ceiling fans been dusted and wiped?

3. Have all light fittings been dusted and wiped inside and out?

4. Were power points and light switches cleaned?

5. Have air conditioners including filters been cleaned?

6. Have drawers and dressers been dusted and wiped; any scuff marks removed?

7. Were shelves dusted and wipe; any scuff marks removed?

8. Have window and door tracks been cleaned?

9. Were window and door screens dusted?

10. Have the insides of windows been washed?

11. Have window frames/sills and door frames been dusted and wiped?

12. Have skirting boards been dusted and wiped; scuff marks removed?

13. Were doors and door frames cleaned?

14. Were blinds dusted and cleaned?

15. Have walls been spot cleaned or washed?

16. Were hard surface floors vacuumed and mopped?

17. Was the intercom telephone wiped down?

18. Were carpeted floors vacuumed?

19. Were hard surface floors vacuumed and mopped?

20. Was high dusting completed?

21. Have all the seats been disinfected and wiped clean?

1. Have all cupboards been cleaned inside and out?

2. Has the laundry sink, taps and plug holes been cleaned?

3. Has the dryer and filters been cleaned?

4. Have all light fittings bee dusted and wiped inside and out?

5. Were all power points and light switches cleaned?

6. Have all air conditioners including filters been cleaned?

7. Have light fittings been dusted and wiped inside and out?

8. Were power points and light switches cleaned?