Donewell / Restaurants / Restaurant opening checklist

Restaurant opening checklist

A restaurant opening checklist is what has to be checked between unlocking the door and taking the first order. It has 17 items in 5 sections — arrival, line, front of house, register and open. Of those, four ask for a reading, two ask for a photo and one is a note; the rest are a tick. It front-loads the readings, because a walk-in that drifted overnight is the one problem that gets worse while you set tables.

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.

What should be on a restaurant opening checklist?

Open with the equipment and finish with the room. Take the walk-in, reach-in and freezer temperatures first — 33–41 °F for the coolers, −10–0 °F for the freezer — because a bad reading at 8 am is a supplier call, and the same reading at 11 am is a menu you can no longer serve. Then hand sinks and sanitizer at 200–400 ppm, then the line against the prep list, then the room, the drawer and the POS.

How long does opening take?

Twenty-five to forty minutes for one manager, longer if prep is behind or the float has to be counted twice. Roughly half of it is standing still: waiting on a probe, waiting for the POS and the printers to come up, waiting for the sanitizer bucket to test where it should. Building that waiting into the list is what stops somebody recording a number they did not actually take.

Who should own the opening list?

Whoever holds the keys, and only that person. An opening checklist signed by three people is a checklist nobody owns. The last two items say so out loud — doors unlocked with the sign on, then a note for the shift — so the handover is written down while the person who did the walk is still standing in the building.

Last updated 17 September 2026