Hotels and restaurants around the world need to be well-organized and stock-up all the necessary supplies required to ensure the business runs like clockwork. Every hotel kitchen has hidden areas that need some extra care and linen items are just one essential supply that should not be neglected in order to maintain cleanliness.
Hotel caterers can’t afford to operate without an adequate supply of kitchen towels, dishcloths, or pot holders, as these are in use throughout shifts and get dirty fast. Quality linens are essential for taking hot dishes out of ovens and streamline the catering function. Kitchen towels are also needed to ensure crockery and utensils are washed and dried adequately. Therefore, it’s good to have different ones for drying and wiping downsides to ensure everything is clean and hygienic.
Tip: Being a stock manager, you need to strictly monitor the stock levels of these hidden essentials, as workers will generally throw them away after one-time use.
The number of kitchen towels available in your linen stock will vary depending upon your facility’s usage, but the essential items are highlighted in this blog.
Importance of Buying Quality Kitchen Linen
While buying linens, remember not to skimp on quality. Busy catering operations in hotels need the best linens to ensure continued durability and a long lifespan. Investing in cheap linens can be false as they frequently last a fraction of the time that can be expected from good quality linens. Leading chefs and professionals trust in products that offer the flexibility and reliability needed in the restaurant trade. Buying your linens in bulk can help make them more affordable and also ensure your inventory is stocked up at all times.
D-ZEE Textiles is a leading manufacturer and supplier of hotel linen and amenities for over 25 years. Our hospitality products are designed to give your hotel guests the memorable experience they desire while reducing your operational cost. From basic to luxurious, you’ll find the perfect products for your guest rooms.
Our range of Salon, Gym, and Kitchen Towels are the same towels used by the pros in restaurants, bars, and hotels all over the USA. They are lightweight, absorbent, and can handle multi-purpose work without falling apart.
Ryotei Pot Holder
Perfect for commercial kitchens, this pot holder is a must-have for any hospitality institution.
- Made with poly-cotton blend for durability and easy machine washing.
- Designed to keep hands safe and keep hot pots, pans, and baking dishes from sliding out of place.
- These essential holders add significant value to any budget.
- Quilted and padded surface offers excellent heat retention and a better grip on hot pots.
- It comes in a double-sided tan color to match any kitchen or guest room style.
Ryotei Dish Cloth
Our Dish Cloths are made from a poly-cotton blend and are low lint. Designed for commercial kitchens, these lightweight, absorbent, durable, and fast-drying dishcloths are ideal for washing, dusting, or cleaning dishes.
- Made with poly-cotton blend for durability and easy machine washing.
- Extra-soft feel and excellent absorption.
- Lightweight, absorbent, easy to dry, and economical.
- The multi-purpose cloth can tackle drying, wiping, cleaning, and other housekeeping tasks.
- It comes in a double-sided tan color with a box pattern to match any kitchen or guest room style.
- Designed for restaurants, hotels, bars, office kitchens, breakrooms, or other hospitality institutions.
Ryotei Kitchen Towel
Used by professionals in restaurants, bars, and hotels around the world, our Kitchen Towels are lightweight, absorbent, and can handle multi-purpose kitchen work without falling apart.
- Made with poly-cotton blend for durability and easy machine washing.
- Extra-soft feel and excellent absorption.
- Lightweight, absorbent, easy to dry, and economical.
- The multi-purpose towel can tackle drying, wiping, cleaning, and other housekeeping tasks.
- It comes in a double-sided tan color with a box pattern to match any kitchen or guest room style.
- Designed for restaurants, hotels, bars, office kitchens, breakrooms, or other hospitality institutions.
Why Buy from D-ZEE?
- Quality is our top priority.
- By removing layers of unnecessary cost, we deliver the best possible value to you.
- We believe stocking up should be simple and hassle-free.
- Our expert support staff is available 24/7 to help you with any questions or concerns.
We’d like to see you buying smarter and saving more on your annual linen budget. Want to buy hospitality products that are comfortable to use and have an extended service life? Visit www.dzeeusa.com
The Best Kitchen Towels
When it comes to quickly drying dishes, hands, and produce, or even handling hot pans and casseroles, nothing is as versatile as a thick cotton towel. Cotton is durable, affordable, and absorbent. But not all cotton towels are the same, and their performance varies with thickness, size, and the type of weave. Listed below are the criteria we believe are most important when selecting a kitchen towel:
Holds up through many wash cycles: Because kitchen towels are exposed to bacteria from your hands, cutting board, and food, they need regular laundering (ideally, multiple times a week, depending on use). A strong weave and durable stitching will help keep your kitchen linens looking like new through those many wash cycles, and high-quality long-staple cotton will hold up better than cheap cotton.
Absorbent and multi-purpose: The effectiveness of a great kitchen towel comes down to a delicate balance of its thickness and size. For example, our top pick is thick and large enough (around 20 by 30 inches) to dry a full draining rack of dishes, and provide protection from hot pots and casseroles when triple-folded.
In comparison, flour sack towels are a lot thinner, but can run up to 33 by 38 inches, and that extra area makes up for their lack of absorbency per square inch. And inexpensive terry cloth bar mops are smaller, measuring around 16 by 19 inches, but good ones made of plush, thirsty cotton terry cloth are still efficient at wiping up spills.
Cute enough to hang in your kitchen: Textiles are a big part of people’s kitchen decor, so we kept aesthetics in mind with our recommendations. Plain, plush fabric sewn with clean hems is attractive by virtue of its construction, but we also looked for towels available in multiple textures and colors. We gave preference to sets available in white because it’s the most neutral color.
To evaluate the quality, absorbency, and durability of our kitchen towels, we ran the following tests:
First, we washed and dried each towel 10 times. This served two purposes: to test the towel’s durability through multiple launderings and to remove the industrial coating (called sizing) that protects the fabric during shipping and storage (but also inhibits absorption). After the wash test, we eliminated kitchen towels with loose threads and frayed hems.
To test absorbency, we laid each towel over ½ cup of spilled black tea or water for 30 seconds, then checked for any unabsorbed liquid. As we predicted, the thinner towels absorbed less per square inch than thicker ones.
We also dried water glasses to check for lint. But after 10 wash and dry cycles, most of the kitchen towels were virtually lint free.
Top pick
With terry cloth on one side and waffle weave on the other, this towel combines absorbency, utility, and attractiveness.
Williams Sonoma All Purpose Pantry Towels offer the best combination of absorbency, durability, attractiveness, and price of all the towels we tested. They're available in loads of colors and the four-pack price averages out to under $6 per towel.
They're absorbent and low-lint. This dense cotton kitchen towel combines two different textures on opposite sides: terry cloth and waffle weave. Though the terry weave is flatter and less plush than that of other terry towels, it absorbs moisture as well as any fluffier cloth we tested.
It dries dishes and glassware without depositing lint, and is thirsty enough to tackle a draining rack full of dishes after dinner. The smoother waffle side also excels at delicate tasks, like de-fuzzing strawberries and blotting water from tender produce.
They're durable. We’ve used and abused the Williams Sonoma towels in our test kitchen since , and they’ve only recently started to show wear in the form of a small hole or snag here and there. For the most part, the seams and stitching are still completely intact. And to say we’re hard on our kitchen towels is an understatement. We deploy them for every spill, from coffee and tea, to red wine and red meat drippings.
We’ve also continued to add more of these towels to our supply. In late , we even retested them, after seeing some reviews on Williams Sonoma’s website suggesting that they’d changed in quality. But after washing and drying the new set five times, we compared them to our older towels and found no difference in performance. It’s helpful to remember that washing can change the look and feel of a towel quite a bit: It will shrink and thicken after one wash, and soften after several, becoming more absorbent as the protective sizing washes off.
They're attractive. The terry cloth loops are small and tightly packed—unlike bathroom hand towels—and waffle weave has a smooth and hygienic look that’s befitting for the kitchen.
Each towel also has a sewn-in corner loop so you can conveniently hang your towel from a hook or drawer pull. If white isn’t your style, the All-Purpose Pantry towel is available in numerous other colors.
Budget pick
These affordable terry cloth towels aren’t cute, but they’ll get the job done, wiping up spills from big to small.
If you’re looking for an affordable kitchen towel built to handle your day-to-day spills, the Utopia Towels Kitchen Bar Mops are your best option. These terry cloth towels are durable, absorbent, and easily washable. They aren’t the kind of towel you’d want to hang on display, but since they cost around $1.50 apiece, you can keep a stack of them stashed in a drawer for extra-messy tasks, and you won’t have to worry too much about stains.
They are excellent at wiping up messy spills. They soaked up ½ cup of water consistently in our tests, and cleaned up a sticky smoothie effectively.
They’re a great value. These inexpensive towels are surprisingly durable considering their price. After running them through the washer (in hot water) and dryer multiple times, we spotted a couple of frayed threads, but the seams held up remarkably well.
They're linty. Although these towels are great for cleaning up spills and drying your hands, they are not meant to polish your glassware. In our tests, they still deposited lint on glasses after multiple runs through the wash.
They also aren’t the most attractive towels. Some may even argue that they resemble cheap bathroom hand towels. But they do come in several colors besides white, which isn’t the case with many other bar mops.
Like most bar mops, they’re small. After laundering, they measure about 15 by 17 inches, whereas standard kitchen towels are about 20 by 30 inches. But if you’re looking to get the job done and aren’t worried about hanging these on display, these are the towels to get.
Although Aunt Martha’s Premium Flour Sack Dish Towels can’t mop up a spill as quickly as our other picks, their usefulness for food preparation sets them apart. They’re oversized (we recommend the 33- by 38-inch size), lint-free, and finely woven. Their absorbency and smoothness make these towels ideal for delicate jobs like wicking excess moisture from tender herbs, lettuces, and berries.
The quality is remarkable. Aunt Martha’s are the thickest and highest-quality flour sack towels we’ve ever tested. We’ve looked at a few flour sack towels over the years, but they were all thinner and less absorbent than Aunt Martha’s. That said, Aunt Martha's aren’t as absorbent as our other picks.
They excel at many tasks. Because they’re lint-free, these cloths are great for drying glassware. Flour sack cotton is thin, so it’s a good alternative to cheesecloth for straining liquids. You can also use these to gently dry tender berries, or wick excess moisture from cut watery vegetables like eggplant. And they're great for serving warm dinner rolls at the table.
They're the largest of all our picks. Even though they’re thinner than the Williams Sonoma towels, the biggest Aunt Martha’s towels are 50 percent larger (measuring 33 by 38 inches to their 20 by 30 inches). So what the Aunt Martha’s towels lack in absorbency per square inch, they make up for in more surface area, and the thinner cotton allows the towel itself to dry faster.
White is the only option. If you’re into colorful or decorative kitchen towels, these are not for you (although they make a good blank canvas for painting or stamping if you want to decorate them yourself).
This is not a comprehensive list of everything we tested in previous iterations of this guide, just what’s still available.
We used to recommend the Now Designs Ribbed Towel. Our original towels are still holding up well, with no traces of loose threads or fraying, but the new towels we bought in are far less durable. Some of the stitches loosened after 10 wash cycles. These findings mirrored some Amazon comments about the towels’ decline in quality.
We can’t say for sure that the Sur la Table Ribbed Kitchen Towels are a rebrand of the Now Designs towels, but they bear an uncanny resemblance. Unlike the Now Designs, the Sur la Table towels held up through multiple washings. But if they are the same towel, we could see durability issues arise down the road.
Like our top pick, the Crate and Barrel Waffle-Terry Dish Towel has a terry-cloth side and a waffle-weave side. But the fabric is almost too thick and absorbent. The tea stain didn’t lift completely, even after a soak in hot water and oxygenated bleach.
Towels by Doctor Joe Surgical Huck Towels are lintless and absorbent, but also small and thin. We think flour sack towels are a better choice because of their large size.
The Utopia Kitchen Flour Sack Towels are smaller and much thinner than our flour sack towel pick. The loose weave makes these so thin, you can almost see through them.
