Pay extra attention to the cleanliness of your bathrooms if you want to keep your customers. Studies have shown that over 80% of people eating at you restaurant will grade your kitchen cleanliness by your bathroom cleanliness and that over 70% will not return if you have a dirty restroom. Keeping a clean bathroom in your restaurant is just common sense and is a requirement to achieve success.

Successful chain restaurants implement checklists and standardized routines to guarantee the restrooms are always clean.

Restrooms must be up to code and compliant with minimum space requirements for handicap accessibility. Keep in mind that this is a minimum and that sometimes the minimum just isn’t good enough. Good design with efficient flow means that the spaces you’re providing for the bathroom must be easy to get to, comfortable and private.

What to achieve:

Adequate number of bathrooms that are not simply trying to meet code. Clients will sometimes want to “get away” with only one bathroom for the entire business. This type of unisex bathroom has its place in certain designs, but overall we encourage to always have at least one women’s and one men’s bathroom. If you have a bar, then we recommend adding an additional bathroom and extra urinals. In some designs if the bar is far away from the bathrooms we will recommend to add an extra bathroom set closer to the bar even if code does not require it.

Code requires that non absorbent material be installed in the bathroom up to 48” from the floor. So the material selection is important. Proven materials that work are tile and FRP. We also receommend that a cove base be brought up from the floor to help with moisture and mopping.

We recommend that a floor drain also be installed in the bathrooms to catch run off from mopping and wet floors.