Up Your Cleaning Game By Treating Your Home Kitchen Like A Restaurant's

We all dream of keeping an immaculately clean kitchen. And while doing so can work wonders for our mental health and focus, actually having to maintain our ideal level of cleanliness can feel daunting — even impossible — some days. Keeping your cabinets stocked with all the cleaning products you should have in your kitchen certainly helps. However, Brand President of The Cleaning Authority Katie Dills explains exclusively to Mashed that it's getting down with the nightly, restaurant-style kitchen shutdown that will truly transform your cleaning game.

Her ultimate tip for a consistently clean cooking space is to treat it like one might treat a professional kitchen. "Doing a full 'shutdown' of the kitchen each night, meaning cleaning and putting away all dishes, wiping down surfaces, and organizing, is good practice," she tells us. Not only is waking up to a clean kitchen the best feeling, but doing a little bit every day ensures that grime doesn't stand a chance of building up. 

"Tips for doing this efficiently include cleaning as you cook, using baskets or trays to collect items for quick storage, and tackling one task at a time to avoid feeling overwhelmed," says Dills. If you're in need of bins, we know of 12 kitchen organizers your pantry could use right now. 

When restaurants close down for the evening, kitchen employees typically have a long checklist of tasks they must complete before clocking out for the evening. Katie Dills suggests creating an end-of-night task list for your own home kitchen — whether that's a mental Rolodex or a physical checklist (your whiteboard would be perfect for this).

Perhaps you have a few kitchen pet peeves or problem areas that you may want to address on your personal kitchen cleaning checklist, but Dills recommends using these as a baseline: "Load and unload the dishwasher, wipe down counters and tables, clean sink and stove, sanitize high-touch areas, and sweep or mop the floor." There are other things in your kitchen you probably never clean — but should, like the refrigerator drawers and the inside of the oven. While it's certainly not necessary to do things of that nature on a daily basis, consider making a monthly or bimonthly cleaning schedule for bigger cleaning projects.