If you have recently opened a new restaurant, then getting good reviews and even better turnouts can be an exciting and invigorating time. It can feel like vindication for those who take the risks to open their own business, but that doesn’t mean you can rest on your laurels. New restaurants often make the mistake of letting their standards slip, and in some key areas, this can begin to really hurt the experience. Here are the areas you should make sure you’re keeping an eye on.

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Make sure the tools of the job work as they should

Every piece of equipment in the kitchen, from the stoves and ovens to every pot and knife, should be maintained to ensure that it is in the best condition. Inefficient food prep tools that aren’t sharpened or cared for are going to get in the way of the cooking process, making your chefs’ jobs harder than they need to be. Faulty cooking equipment can start to alter the taste of the food or make food prep take longer. Weekly equipment inspections and daily maintenance should be part of running the restaurant, with final checks before opening for the day or evening.

Cleanliness is your business

The cleanliness of the kitchen is going to affect not just the hygiene of any food prep or storage, but it’s going to affect the morale, motivation, and engagement in the kitchen, as well. It’s essential to trail your chefs to clean as they go, but if you want to make sure that you keep up with the best, then you need to think about inviting commercial kitchen cleaning services, as well. This is the most important part of maintaining the physical kitchen, itself.

Regular training is a must

Getting a trained chef in or helping new serving staff learn the rules at the start isn’t enough. You need to make sure that your existing staff keeps their skills sharp by having regular training. Restaurant training courses can help your staff make sure that they are following every standard. It’s an important rule to remember that even professionals will start to forget details of what they learned in training almost immediately after they finished learning it. Everyone needs a refresher.

Document everything

It’s not enough to simply make sure that standards are set and to check that they are being followed. Those standards need to become a part of the core of how you run the restaurant. As such, the best way to do this is to systematize them and document them. Keeping checklists of kitchen standards and printing them to go on the wall can serve as an easily visible reminder to your staff as to what they should be doing. Similarly, things like plating standards can be maintained by taking pictures of the plates to go by the plating area.

Slipping standards are an all-too-real risk of running a restaurant. Hopefully, the tips above give you some ideas on how to stop it from happening in your new restaurant.

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