Restaurant Maintenance
In This Chapter
- Why you need professional cleaners as well as help from staff
- How to manage regular cleaning tasks using checklists
- Good practices to follow to keep a clean kitchen
- How to maintain your equipment and appliances
- What not to try to fix yourself
Cleaning is one of the most important daily tasks in a restaurant, and it doesn’t stop there. In this chapter, we’ll show you how to involve your staff and professional commercial cleaning services. We’ll talk about the best practices to follow to keep a sanitary restaurant.
Maintaining equipment, such as heating and cooling systems, ovens, refrigerators, and freezers, requires a good relationship with servicing companies, handymen, and plumbers. Being handy is an advantage for a restaurant owner, but there are definitely jobs you should never try on your own.
Have you ever noticed how cluttered, dusty spaces make you feel? Clear the surfaces, dust, vacuum, and polish, and your spirits lift. Cleanliness creates energy. Maybe it’s something about the light reflecting off clean surfaces? People subliminally register this and it enhances their mood.
Cleaning must be a daily routine. In a restaurant, a combination of daily cleaning incorporated into the FOH’s daily side work keeps a handle on the dining room. In the kitchen, the BOH cleans every evening. A professional service is needed for heavy kitchen cleaning and bathrooms.
The truth is, your FOH staff is going to try to do the minimum, wiping up crumbs and getting rid of clutter. Everybody likes a shortcut. Plus, your staff is tired at the end of a busy night; they don’t have the energy or motivation.
So add a professional service, either daily or weekly. They’ll arrive wearing gloves and will bring the right products, equipment, and energy to make the dining room sparkle. In the BOH, a hood service company will really deep-clean and get out the grease. The heavy, greasy work in a restaurant is best left to professionals.
Training Staff in Cleaning 101
Use color-coded mops and sponges for the bathroom, dining room, and kitchen. Make sure your staff knows that a bathroom sponge is never used in the kitchen or the dining room because it spreads germs. There’s a basic sensibility to working in a restaurant, and if any your staff don’t understand that, they shouldn’t be working there.
SMART MOVE
An opening and closing checklist, kept on a clipboard, is the best tool for the daily work of the team. It allocates duties, reminds them of their responsibilities, and they check off each task when they’ve completed it.
Using the kitchen mop in the dining room is another offense. If you get grease in a mop, no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to get it out. People have different degrees of cleanliness standards. When they use a wet, dirty rag instead of a clean one, a dirty restaurant follows. That’s how you end up with the disgusting kitchens you see on those television shows about failing restaurants.
Waiters might scatter and hide, but they’re your most affordable army. Put them to work in 15 minute bursts instead of big Saturday projects. In 15 minutes, the waiters can wipe down all the bases of the tables and legs of chairs. Assign all staff pre- and post-service duties.
The list of side work for the FOH may include the following:
- Cleaning and resetting all candles.
- Rolling 50 napkins with silverware.
- Cleaning all menus and sorting out torn or soiled ones.
- Filling 50 containers of hot sauce.
Daily cleaning and pre- and post-service tasks include:
- Wiping down table bases and legs.
- Washing banisters and baseboards.
- Dusting picture frames.
- Dusting ceiling corners and upper walls to remove cobwebs.
In some cases, the FOH staff clean the windows. The most important glass in your restaurant is in the front door and front windows. Nothing makes a worse first impression than a grimy front door. It should be cleaned outside and in from top to bottom once a week, and spot-checked every morning and before dinner service.
If you’re a family-friendly restaurant where children’s grubby hands leave a snail-like trail of smears on doors and windows, you’ll have to clean more frequently, perhaps a couple times a day. Anything made of glass should gleam. If you have a glass window separating the kitchen from the dining room, it needs special attention.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
A cleaning professional once said that door handles are the most overlooked dirty places. In a restaurant, many hands touch them. Cleaning and sanitizing door handles, from front door to bathrooms, should be on your list of daily post-service cleaning tasks.
If it’s a rainy night and sales are slow, you could send everyone home, but that means they’ll make less money. Or you can order a pizza, open a bottle of wine, and reorganize the supply closet. (Of course, you should avoid staff drinking as a practice but use it as a special treat. It can be a useful reward when dispensed with care.) There’s a constant need to stay on top of cleaning and organizing, and you’ve got to find ways to reinforce teamwork while doing it.
Votives and Vases
Dirty votive candle holders and flower vases also make an awful impression. Be careful to not spend too much on flowers, and make sure they’re fresh. They need to last at least four to five days—anything else isn’t practical.
Each night, remove vases and store them in the walk-in if there’s room. The cool air helps preserve the flowers, just as it does in the cooler at the florist’s shop. In the morning, a pre-service FOH task is to wash the vases, change the water, and clip the stem slightly on an angle to let it absorb more water and last longer.
Putting water in the bottom of the glass votive will make it easy to pop out the used hardened wax with a table knife. Glass votive holders can be cleaned by filling them with hot water, which will melt any wax residue. Make sure your staff doesn’t throw the waxy water down the bar drain, because the wax will harden and clog it. Pour it through a strainer to catch the wax.
Working Neat
Any cleaning expert will tell you the best way to keep things clean is to not make a mess. You can establish your protocols and train the staff to follow them, but in the heat of the moment, stuff starts flying. Make each person on your staff responsible for cleaning their workstation.
The biggest mess staff makes is the trash bags. We’ve seen staff perplexed by having to remove a lemon wedge from a glass of ice. What do they do? Dump it, ice and all, in the garbage. The same goes for celery in Bloody Marys—they dump the melted tomato water and ice into the garbage. At the end of the evening, the busboy drags this leaking bag across the room, leaving another mess to clean up.
Filter baskets in all sink drains are one of the most important small items you can have on hand. They prevent stirrers, straws, and other items from going down the drains and causing clogs, inevitably on a busy Saturday night. Have extra filter baskets on hand, as they are always getting lost.
Train your staff not to spray cleaners or disinfectants on dining room tables when guests are in the room. The spray and smell are carried through the air, and will ruin a guest’s dining experience. A rag sprayed with disinfectant can be used more discreetly, without bothering other guests.
Checklists
The key to managing cleaning is to use checklists. You should have checklists for daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal tasks. In addition, keep checklists for the professional cleaners, too. Review the checklist when you hire them, and show how you want them to check off the tasks when completed.
In the bathroom, for instance, you don’t want a trace of grime around the bottom of the faucets, handles, or the edges of sinks. Scrubbing them with a clean toothbrush is the only way to thoroughly clean them. Extra effort has to go into keeping it that way.
Weekly BOH cleaning includes tasks such as cleaning out the shelves in the bar coolers. Monthly tasks include taking all the shelves out of the walk-in for a good scrubbing.
BOH Cleaning
The kitchen needs professional cleaners with heavy equipment to keep it in top shape for passing inspections. Staff cannot get the floors and hoods really clean without weekly help from an industrial-strength service.
Every night, each station is cleaned, and mats are removed and cleaned. The floors are swept, the drain filter is cleared, and the floors are washed and hosed down. Then bleach is poured down the floor drain.
The floor drain also requires special attention. Plumbing is one thing that will make you tear your hair out. Make sure the floor drain filter is in place. Have a supply of extras on hand to replace disappearing drain filters. When the drain is open, all sorts of stuff, such as lemon wedges, garlic, and grape stems, gets into the pipes and causes clogs. When drains back up, it can really mess with your business. Once a week, pour pipe drain solution down the floor drain.
The best exterminator Jody ever worked with was in California. He guaranteed his customers wouldn’t have bugs as long as his guys came in and looked over the place and discovered any deficiencies. They put red flags in every area that was drawing pests or vermin, and the staff had to clean up those areas or the guarantee would be invalid.
But you can’t be lax just because you have an exterminator. You need a coordinated effort to fight pests. Cockroaches eat the glue found in cardboard boxes, so every time you open a box you likely bring in cockroaches. You have to constantly try to keep them from breeding.
An obsessive owner cleans in every corner, using degreasers and disinfectants where needed. No dirty wet things, such as a used rag, can be left overnight. Used towels, uniforms, aprons, and napkins must be collected and placed in laundry bags, ready for pick-up the next day.
Maintenance
Scheduling maintenance, and following those schedules, is the key to keeping your equipment running. You must keep daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal to-do lists. If you don’t, you run the risk of breakdowns. What can be worse on a freakishly hot early spring day than to discover your air conditioner isn’t working? Or when you realize on a cold November day that you forgot to have the furnace serviced, and you’ve got a dining room full of freezing guests and dirty workmen are walking in and out?
Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning
Heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are the biggest maintenance items. Many restaurants are located in old buildings with outdated, poorly functioning HVAC systems. Restaurants in newly constructed or renovated buildings often have HVAC systems with enough horsepower to recover temperature well. You need to learn your system’s limitations so you can regulate the temperature.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
If every staff member has the ability to adjust the restaurant’s heat at whim, your electric, gas, or oil bills will be exorbitant, and your customers might complain about being too hot or too cold. You need to control the temperature. Invest in locking thermostat covers to prevent people from turning the heat up and down. Only you and your manager should be able to unlock the thermostat.
Controlling the heat is an important part of creating the right environment in a restaurant. We suggest you keep it at 68°. But if you know it will be a busy winter night, drop it to 65° so it doesn’t get too warm when the room is full of people. On a hot summer day, set the temperature at 60°. When the place fills up, it won’t get too hot.
New or old, HVAC filters need to be checked regularly, the systems cleaned, and filters replaced. Put these maintenance items and service calls on your yearly calendar.
Plumbers
Treat your plumbers well. There are always plumbing issues in restaurants because people stuff things down the toilet, or the bar sink backs up. Be prepared to tackle emergency clogs yourself. Keep a professional plunger and a snake on hand. If you’re not handy, make sure someone on your staff is, and pay them extra if they step outside their usual role (dishwashing, for example) to get things working. Having a handyman in the neighborhood with a range of fix-it skills is also a good idea.
Handyman
Having a guy with a toolbox around is great. There’s always something coming apart in a restaurant. In most restaurants, the stove handles get loose. If you screw them in every week, you can prevent a bigger job when they fall off and roll away into an inaccessible corner. Forming a relationship with a handyman is important, because things always break at 8 o’clock on a busy Friday night, not at 10 o’clock Tuesday morning. A plumber who will leave his own dinner table on a rainy night to come to your restaurant to fix an emergency is invaluable.
SMART MOVE
There’s no end to the work that needs to be done to keep a restaurant running. The fuel jets on the stove get clogged. You take a bamboo skewer to clean out each hole. Those are the tasks that, if left unattended, slow down the entire system during service.
Knives
Most chefs nowadays own a set of knives and sharpen them themselves. In the old days, the kitchen supplied the knives and there was a service to send the knives out to be sharpened. But those services are losing their market grip.
Chefs tote their knife collection with great pride, unfurling leather pouches with carbon blades and Japanese composite blades. They sharpen their knives in-house with a steel and whetstone. No one else touches their knives. They don’t even let the dishwasher wash them. The kitchen provides a couple of house knives for the prep cooks. The chefs teach the cooks to sharpen those knives.
Appliance Repair
Establish a relationship with a local commercial appliance maintenance and repair firm and their technicians. Make sure you have their cell phone numbers for emergencies.
SMART MOVE
Temperatures in ovens, refrigerators, and freezers should be calibrated twice a year. Many people only do this once a year. Check temperatures with a thermometer every month. Health inspectors will cite you if your refrigerators and freezers are at an improper temperature.
Some of these firms have service contracts, and you’ll have to weigh whether it’s worth paying more for the yearly checkup and free 24-hour emergency service. It also depends on how old your equipment is, and whether you are handy. One theory is that when the company knows it’s on the hook for 24-hour emergency service, they’ll make an annual service call to make sure the system will be working all year. Schedule a yearly October date for having the furnace system checked.
Do Not Attempt!
Unless you’re a licensed and insured appliance technician, don’t attempt to fix any major gas-fired appliances. And don’t mess with your electrical circuit breaker wires, either.
We know a chef-owner who was desperate to save money, so he tried to fix a broken gas oven himself. He thought it might be a clog in the gas line, so he took the air compressor, and while the oven was on, started to blow air into the line.
BOOOOM! The oven door flung open with force, hit him on the head, and threw him across the room. The front doors swung open from the pressure. The restaurant was closed, but the staff felt their ears pop. Luckily, he was the only person in that part of the kitchen.
The chef-owner was a stoic guy, but as he lay on the floor, singed and smoking, he said, “I think I have to go to the hospital.” The fire department came. The ambulance arrived and carried him out on a stretcher. His face and hair were burned, and his eyebrows were gone. He could have been killed; instead, he was back at work the next day. Hurting, yes, but back on the job, having learned a very scary yet valuable lesson: leave certain dangerous repairs to a professional.
Finding Good Tradespeople
How do you find good tradespeople? Get references—someone always knows somebody they can recommend. A waiter has an uncle, a hostess has a brother-in-law; your restaurant is a collection of people who know people in the trades. However, you don’t want a plumber or electrician whose clients are all residential. Other environments don’t always translate to a commercial restaurant space. You want tradespeople with skills within your domain, the restaurant business.
We all want to help our friends, but a beginning restaurateur who hires a friend who is a residential electrician may have to have the work redone to bring it to commercial levels.
It’s sad there isn’t more sharing of this kind of information within the restaurant community these days. It could be a useful resource in many ways. Restaurants used to be more social. Nowadays, it’s not the fraternity it could be. Many restaurateurs are too competitive and secretive to help others.
Grease Traps
There’s a lot of grease and fat in the restaurant business. To keep it out of sewer pipes and septic systems, grease filter systems are required by departments of health. These systems need to be serviced regularly by a commercial grease trap cleaner who will vacuum out the disgusting stuff and haul it away.
If grease traps are not serviced, the most vile odor in the world will infiltrate your restaurant. If they’re not regularly serviced they can overflow, and a disgusting rancid smell will permeate the place. We suggest you use electric systems that constantly skim the grease from the surface. Be extremely diligent about having your grease trap serviced.
Fire Prevention
Fire is a major safety concern in a restaurant. Fire extinguishers have an expiration date, and by law you need a service person to refuel and charge them. Then this person will give the extinguishers stickers showing they’ve been serviced. The fire department will check for that during inspections.
Smoke alarms, emergency lights, and carbon monoxide alarms need to have their batteries tested every week. Batteries need to be replaced every couple of months.
Sidewalks/Entrances/Parking Lots
Keep your sidewalks clean. Check for trash each morning, sweep the sidewalks, and wash them if necessary. Shake out the front mat, water and freshen plants, and pull off yellowed leaves and spent blossoms. These tasks are usually assigned to the bus staff. They’ll pick up trash and cigarette butts in the parking lot, too. Parking lot maintenance is usually managed by the landlord and shared by tenants who pay a common area charge. We discussed this in detail in Chapter 7.
Décor and Furnishings
Keep an eye on how your soft furnishings are holding up. Clean stains daily as needed, and check weekly for wear, tears, or frays. Fixing small things holds off having to buy expensive replacement furnishings. Keep decorative elements dust-free and polished.
Here’s a thought on vintage pieces. Jody has worked with vintage in some of his restaurants, and really loves it. An old leather suitcase can be beautiful if it’s been kept in good condition. But battered, scratched, and worn beyond repair? That’s junk. A vintage upholstered chair is cool, but a vintage upholstered chair with broken springs and worn, faded, dirty-looking fabric? That’s junk. Keep your soft furnishings looking fresh and attractive.
Maintaining a restaurant is an ongoing campaign. But if you mobilize your troops, maintain your equipment, and stay vigilant, you can indeed win the war.
- Hire professionals for heavy cleaning and grease removal.
- Keep daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal cleaning task checklists for your FOH and BOH staff, and for professional cleaners.
- Use recommended tradespeople who are experienced in working in restaurants.
- Make friends with your appliance repairmen, plumbers, and handymen.
- Don’t attempt repairs on gas-fired appliances or gas lines, or on your electrical circuit box; leave those tasks to licensed professionals.