Your Guide to Restaurant Towels

Towels are an integral part of any food service operation because they have the ability to keep the restaurant clean and running. However, they get dirty and need to be replenished. When dealing with food, professionally laundered towels are key to helping you protect your restaurant against contaminants like bacteria.

Choosing restaurant towels doesn’t have to be complicated. We’ve created a guide to help our food service and hospitality customers simplify restaurant towel service planning.

The Role of Towels in Restaurants

From the kitchen to the bar to the dining room, there are countless times towels are needed in food and beverage service. As such, there are many different types of towels for different applications, including soaking up spills, sanitizing tables, drying dishes and grill cleaning. Restaurant towels perform all types of dirty jobs and it’s important that your food service towels are readily available for employees to quickly use on the go.

Different Types of Restaurant Towels

There are many different ways in which towels can be used. Your cooks might use a towel to quickly wipe down their stations while preparing food. Your bartenders might keep a towel handy on their apron for wiping their hands on the go. Vestis offers many types of restaurant towels for our food service customers.

Dining Room Towels

Dining room towels aren’t a specific type of towel but simply a catchall for towels used by dining staff. These crew members require quick access to absorbent towels for wiping down tables and tackling spills while on the move. Dining room towels allow servers to maintain a safe environment by helping to ensure a slip-free, hygienic dining area. Because of their visibility to patrons, it’s important to keep your dining room towels clean and presentable.

Kitchen Towels

Kitchen towels are durable and absorbent enough to handle the many jobs in the kitchen. Kitchen staff rely on their towels to wipe and sanitize cook stations, mop up spills and wipe down high-touch surfaces. Our kitchen towels are manufactured specifically for food service kitchens and designed to last.

Microfiber Towels

The super-absorbent, ultra-fine fibers make Microfiber towels a go-to solution for many cleanup jobs in the food service industry. Microfiber towels dry fast and won’t leave scratches on wiped or scrubbed surfaces. They are also lightweight yet extremely durable which make them a great all-around restaurant towel.

Grill Towels

Most restaurant towels are capable of tackling basic cleanup duties, but few are cut out for cleaning the grill. Grill towels exist for this very purpose.

Grill towels, sometimes referred to as grill pads, are made to help withstand the heat from the grill while removing tough grease and grime from grill surfaces. Use grill towels to scrub your grill and other hot surfaces to keep your appliances clean without burning through your other kitchen towels.

Bar Towels

Bar towels are smaller, lighter and more absorbent than most other food service towels. Vestis bar towels can soak up 4 times more liquid than a leading food service disposable wipe1. Bartenders often carry these towels on them or keep them within reach to quickly grab to keep their bar sparkling clean.

Bar towels are also effective at wiping down counters and tabletop surfaces, and so a good stockpile of bar towels can help you in many ways.

Dish Towels

Restaurants should keep a separate set of dish towels reserved for drying dishes. This ensures that a towel used on a grill surface or to clean up a food spill will never be used to scrub a clean dish that is intended to be served to customers.

Glass Towels

Glass towels are much like dish towels in that they are absorbent and soft. They are designed to leave a streak-free finish on delicate glassware or silverware. They can effectively clean windows and mirrors as well.

Cleaning Restaurant Towels

Clean towels might be the most important resource for keeping your restaurant sanitary. Dirty towels can do a lot of damage by spreading unwanted germs and bacteria, so it’s important that clean towels are always available. But constant towel maintenance can become a burden on busy restaurant workers considering the quantity of towels to be stocked, cleaned and sometimes replaced entirely.

Vestis helps restaurants by providing reliable service for the management, maintenance, laundering and storage of both clean and dirty towels.

Vestis: Your Towel Rental and Cleaning Solution

Whether your business focuses on indoor dining, outdoor dining, takeout, delivery, curbside or ghost kitchens, Vestis offers flexible towel services that can scale with your needs. While you’re using your linens and towels, Vestis professionally launders your dirty towels and linens, as well as uniforms and other garments, using a wash formula specifically designed for food and beverage soils.

A convenient rental program can help your facility, staff and customers be safer, cleaner and healthier. Here’s how it works:

1. A Vestis representative works with you to help you determine your overall towel needs
2. We drop off freshly laundered towels on your schedule delivery day
3. We pick up dirty towels at your location
4. We launder your towels with a special wash formula designed to remove tough stains
5. We monitor inventory levels to make sure you have what you need when you need it

Contact your local Vestis team to learn more!

¹Based on a 2014 third-party testing performed by Intertek and funded by Vestis.