Restaurant closing checklist
A restaurant closing checklist is everything that has to be true before the last person locks the back door. It has 27 items in 6 sections — front of house, line, dish, walk-in, back of house and back door. Of those, three ask for a reading, four ask for a photo and one is a note; the rest are a tick. The sections follow the building rather than the departments, so nobody crosses the kitchen four times.
Tick it here — nothing is saved anywhere but this browser — or copy it into Donewell and have your staff sign each item off on their phone.
Front of house
Line
Dish
Walk-in
Back of house
Back door
Tick an item to keep your place. Ticks are kept in this browser only.
What should be on a restaurant closing checklist?
Three things separate a closing list that works from one that gets initialled in the parking lot. It follows the walk — front of house, line, dish, walk-in, back of house, back door — instead of grouping by job title. It asks for evidence on the items that are expensive to get wrong: chairs up, restrooms, hood filters, food covered and dated. And it ends at the back door, with the lock, the alarm and the lights, because that is the item that costs a night of inventory when it gets skipped.
How long does closing a restaurant take?
Forty to fifty minutes for a crew of two after the last table leaves. The floor and the dish machine are the fixed costs; almost everything else is a walk and a look. Two readings are worth waiting for rather than guessing — the line cooler wants 33–41 °F and the dish machine’s final rinse 180–195 °F — and a rinse temperature taken mid-cycle is the single most common reason a closing log is wrong.
What does a health inspector see the next morning?
The consequences, not the list. Food uncovered or undated in the walk-in, cases stored on the floor, hand sinks without soap or towels, grease pooling at the hood filters, cold holding above 41 °F. Every one of those is an item here, which is the argument for photographing four of them: a photo taken at 11:40 pm is the only version of last night that still exists at 9 am.
This page proves what to do. Donewell proves it got done.
A tick on this page is a scratch mark: no name on it, no time, no photo, and it disappears with your browser data. In Donewell the same 27 items carry who signed them off and when, with a photo on the 4 that ask for one, and anything missed is in your inbox by morning.
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