Today, I'm going to show you how to make an effective restaurant checklist.
Hey, everybody. Ryan Gromfin here – author, speaker, chef, restaurateur,
founder of TheRestaurantBoss.com,
ClickBacon.com, and ScaleMyRestaurant.com
Today is actually going to be the first of four,
maybe even five videos in a series about restaurant checklist.
I love checklist.
You may love them; you may hate them;
I'm going to convert you to a lover of checklist right now.
If you operate or manage a restaurant, you're in the exact right place.
So, watch today's video, and then depending on when you're watching this,
watch all the follow up videos, but today is all about an effective
restaurant checklist.
You know, we've heard many, many times.
You've probably even said this yourself – yeah, yeah checklist don't work, I've tried them.
And that's what we're going to conquer,
that's what we're going to overcome in this
video series as we launch these videos over the next month,
but today is about building an effective restaurant checklist.
So, first, let's just talk about a checklist in general.
The first most important thing about a checklist
is that they assign items to a specific
person or station.
Usually a station, but keep in mind a station can only be operated
by one person.
If you have two people working in a station,
then you have to have station 1 and station 2
or station A and station B. Maybe you have two fry cooks,
then you'll have fry 1 and fry 2.
You cannot assign a checklist to multiple people.
You can't just have a kitchen checklist or an opening checklist.
You have to have an opening checklist
for a specific person or station.
The second thing that's important to know about checklist
is that they define quantity and
quality to be ready for service.
Sometimes you'll hear me say service, sometimes you'll hear me say a shift,
but what the checklist does is it basically make sure that someone
has anything and everything that they need
for a successful shift.
Anything and everything that they need
for a successful shift
with the correct quantity and quality.
And that's basically, the restaurant checklist tells WHO
what to do, it tells WHO what to do.
Now, there's different kinds of checklist.
You may have an opening checklist which basically tells people how to open up,
how to get their station ready.
You may have a maintenance checklist
that tells people every month we have to make sure we do this maintenance,
every quarter we have to make sure we do this,
every year we have to make sure we do this.
You may have a closing checklist that reminds
people what needs to get done to close up shop,
but for today's purposes,
we're going to jump inside my computer and I'm going to show you right now
how to build an opening station checklist.
Hey, so okay, we're inside my computer and this is our software called Click Bacon.
Now you could use Excel, you could use anything to do this,
but I just wanted to quickly show you how easy it is to create a checklist,
but more importantly, what needs to be on that checklist and what it should look like.
We're going to try to do this quickly,
but this is going to take a few minutes to do it right.
So, we're going to call it the fry opening…
it helps me spell it correctly – the fry opening checklist.
This is going to be, we have some defaults in here,
so this is going to be a checklist prep sheet.
It's for the fry station and we're going to add it to the weekly group,
so that way we can print all the weekly sheets at once.
We're going to turn on date because date is always turned on.
You can turn on par or off par. You could turn on units or off.
I'm going to turn them off for now, but I'll show you what it looks like later,
and then monthly and split cells.
Weekly or monthly would be as this a weekly sheet.
meaning it's Monday to Friday. Or is this a monthly sheet,
meaning January, February, March, April, May.
And I'm going to show you some cool things you can do with that.
And then a split cell would mean, if you have like an A.M. and a P.M.
shift working the station and it's exactly the same,
then you could just create one sheet and split the cells
so that way you could have like an AM mark off the left cell and P.M.
mark off the right cell,
but I'm just going to quickly build something here for you
and then we're going to display it,
so you'll see what it looks like and you'll easy this would be to do either in Excel or,
of course, using our software called Click Bacon,
if you prefer. But either way, so let's just start with location.
We already know who this list is for.
This list is for the fry station,
so whoever is working the fry station.
Now if you have more than one person working the fry station,
it would be for fry station 1 or fry station 2,
but chances are you only have one person working the fry station.
So now think of this as the sub-location.
This is the location within the fry station, so let's just first say,
let's go to the fry fridge - that's what we're going to call it.
Maybe you have a refrigerator like
next to the fry station or across from the fry station.
It might be like a sandwich top fridge,
so it's called the fry fridge and one thing we're going to need is,
I'm just making this up. Of course, it’s French fries.
We're going to also need mozzarella sticks,
let's just call the MOT sticks.
We're going to need onion rings.
Maybe you hand batter your own fish and chips,
so we're going to need the halibut fillets
for the fish and chips.
We're going to need the seasoned
flour mix.
We're going to also need the egg wash,
right? But here's the other thing.
Anything and everything for a successful shift.
So, let's assume maybe you do calamari also,
so let's put on marinated
calamari, but…
I have spelled that wrong, whatever.
But then, let's say that you just go right from the calamari
into the flour mixture, but you shake it off in a colander of some sort.
Well, you need that colander on the station as well
or strainer or basket, let's just call it a basket, whatever it is.
The point is, you need anything and everything
for a successful shift.
Let's take this even one step further.
Let's go ahead and add a new section and I'll show you what this does is -
let's add,oh where is it, the fry tabletop
because maybe the seasoned flour
goes on the tabletop,
the egg wash goes on the tabletop,
and the basket goes in the seasoned flour on the tabletop.
And maybe on the tabletop, you also have some
squirt bottles,
maybe you have like some kind of aioli in a squirt bottle as a garnish.
Maybe you have chopped parsley,
maybe you also need…
you need the newspaper or the basket liners
to go for the fish and chips.
Basket liners. You might also need the baskets, right?
But then, let's take it even one step further.
Let's add another section because there's the window,
right? So, did I do fry window? Now, let's just call it the window,
the pass-through window.
Well, maybe you keep to-go containers in the window, so you need
small brown to-go containers,
you need large Brown to-go containers.
You also might need a marker,
so that way they could mark off when an order is done.
You might also need a stapler so they could staple a ticket to
in order.
You might also need a ticket punch.
Like for when the tickets are done.
you stab it on the ticket puncher or the tickets tab, or…
I cannot repeat this enough -
anything and everything needed for a successful shift.
You might even need extra paper,
ticket, printer, paper, right?
Anything and everything for a successful shift
and then divide it by where it goes.
Now, this brings into play possibly labeling your fridges and your freezers.
We could really get crazy here,
but I just wanted to quickly show you.
Let me show you what this looks like.
Let's save it
and then let's preview this.
So, we can see what this looks like when it's built and you can see
that it's simply divided
by section, right? It says it's the fryer opening checklist and it's for the fry station,
so we know what it is.
It's divided into the sections, right?
So the fry refrigerator, the fry tabletop,
the window, and then it's divided by days of the week with the date.
The date is important as we've discussed or we will discuss in future videos.
Now, let's also, let's get out of the preview.
So, let's go back
and let me show you some of the other things.
Let's say we turn on par and we turn on units.
I'm not going to bother with low/high.
but let's just say that the par is 1,
and then it's a 3rd pan - a 6-inch 3rd pan.
Let's just say that the par is 1.
Same thing, let's do a 6-inch 3rd pan for onion rings.
Maybe you don't sell that many onion rings,
so let's do 1. Actually, you sell a lot of onions.
Let's do a half pan, a 6-inch half pan,
etc., etc., etc.
I just want to quickly now show you what that looks like just so you can see.
Right, so then it shows the par and all that.
Now. we also talked about it you can adjust in the settings
whether your day starts on a Sunday or a Monday or Tuesday.
I like to start them on a Monday, it's up to you,
but one of the other things is let's assume that you're closed on
Sundays. Well, you can just block the Sunday off and then
you don't even have to worry about it.
Or let's assume,
let’s just quickly assume that this was a maintenance
log or a cleaning log, right?
And you're going to clean certain things on certain days of the week.
So like let me just show you quickly, maybe you're going to clean,
right?
So, I think you'll see what I'm quickly doing here.
Again, assuming this is a cleaning log.
Again, you can do this in whatever software works for you,
but there, then you can see like, okay,
we're going to clean whatever this is.
We're going to clean this on Sunday and this on Monday and this on Tuesday,
this on Wednesday, this on Thursday, right?
If this was an order guide, let's say.
Let's say that you do you're ordering on…
there it is.
Let's say that you do you're ordering on Mondays and Thursday,
so then even though we print it out, we can have it blocked off like that.
Now assume this was a monthly order guide and we had January,
February, March, April, May. If you did things on a quarterly basis,
you could block off February March,
but leave January, April - what would it be.
It would be – January, April, September, open,
and whatever. you get the point.
So again, I just wanted to quickly show you - this is what a properly
formatted checklist should look like.
And I just wanted to show you how quickly and easy they are to build.
Again, whether you're using Excel or whether you're using our software.
I think they're a little bit easier in our software.
If you want to learn more about it, they'll be a link below
but you could just go to ClickBacon.com
That's clickBacon, like up here. clickBacon.com and learn more
about the software.
You can even come in here and build up to 10 sheets completely free,
without even entering a credit card number or creating an account,
but of course, if you have any questions or comments
or concerns or want to know more about
how to build a checklist or anything at all related to this,
just go ahead and post it in the comments below
and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.
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