Commercial Dishwashers for Garden Centre Restaurants.

A trip to the garden centre isn’t just about plants anymore.

For many customers, the restaurant or café has become a serious part of the day out, with a catering trade that can run from breakfast right through to afternoon tea. The Horticultural Trades Association (HTA) estimates there were 148 million visits to UK garden centre cafés and restaurants in 2024 — that’s a lot of food being served, and an equally significant amount of washing up.

And it’s not slowing down. In August 2026, café and restaurant sales were up 10% year-on-year, even as gardening sales fell 7% during the UK’s warmest summer on record. The restaurant gives customers a reason to visit whatever the weather is doing, and that changes what’s expected of the kitchen behind it.

From Elevenses to Afternoon Tea

A garden centre restaurant won’t necessarily have just one lunchtime rush.

Breakfast generates the first plates, cups and cutlery. Elevenses follows. Lunch may bring the biggest peak, but it’s soon followed by coffee, cake and afternoon tea.

Even a simple coffee-and-cake order can mean a cup, saucer, teaspoon, side plate and fork heading back to the kitchen. Multiply that across a full restaurant and the wash area can quickly become a bottleneck.

For this kind of operation, a commercial passthrough dishwasher makes a great deal of sense.

Why a Passthrough Dishwasher?

Passthrough dishwashers, sometimes called hood dishwashers, are built for volume.

Wash cycles run in just a few minutes, so staff can wash crockery and get it back into service quickly when demand is at its highest.

There’s an ergonomic advantage too. Staff handle racks at working height, rather than repeatedly bending down to load and unload a front-opening machine.

But perhaps the biggest advantage is workflow. While one rack washes, staff can clear and load the next. Once the cycle finishes, the clean rack moves out and the next moves in.

Plan the Whole Wash Area

A passthrough works best with properly planned inlet and outlet tabling.

The inlet side gives incoming crockery somewhere to be cleared and racked, while the outlet gives clean racks somewhere to land. Depending on the kitchen, you can arrange this in a straight line or around a corner.

That means measuring for more than the dishwasher itself. Allow for the tabling and hood height, and check the electrical supply, water supply and drainage before deciding on a machine.

Water treatment is worth considering too, particularly in hard-water areas, along with requirements such as a drain pump or break tank.

What If Space Is Tight?

Not every garden centre restaurant has room for a passthrough with inlet and outlet tabling, particularly where the original kitchen design didn’t anticipate the volume of catering it now handles.

Where space is limited, a high-output commercial undercounter dishwasher may be more practical. Combination dishwasher/glasswasher models offer further flexibility where one machine needs to handle both crockery and glassware — the DC BW50A D, for example, switches between bottle washer, glasswasher and dishwasher by changing the rack, processing up to 40 racks an hour from a compact footprint.

How Much Capacity Do You Need?

Think about the restaurant at its busiest. How many covers do you serve? How quickly are tables turning? Does most of the crockery arrive back in one heavy lunchtime rush, or in a steadier stream?

Compare rack size, cycle times and racks per hour, but weigh them against the layout and staffing. There’s little benefit in paying for very high output if the surrounding wash area can’t make use of it.

Think About Everything You’re Washing

A garden centre restaurant washes more than dinner plates. From the tables come cups, saucers, teapots, cake plates and cutlery. If you’re licensed, add wine glasses, pint glasses and other glassware, which need their own racks and shouldn’t be an afterthought.

Then there’s the kitchen. If you’re baking, making soup and preparing lunches on site, you’re also washing baking trays, gastro pans, mixing bowls, pots and utensils. These are bulkier, harder to rack and tend to arrive in bursts.

So think about what will share the machine, and check the hood height and racks before you choose. It’s a much easier conversation before you plan the wash area than after you install it.

Planning Your Garden Centre Restaurant Kitchen?

Our advice is simple: start with your menu and your busiest hour, not the machine.

Tell us what you’re serving, what you’re washing, how many covers you do at peak, how much space you have and what water, drainage and electrical supplies are available. From there, we can help plan the layout, supply the right equipment and arrange fitting and installation.

It starts with the wash area. Anglia Catering Equipment supplies commercial passthrough dishwashers from manufacturers including DC, Classeq, Sammic, Prodis and Adler, alongside commercial undercounter dishwashers and combination dishwasher/glasswashers. But we can equip the rest of the kitchen too, from ventless cooking and food preparation equipment to whatever cooks what’s on your menu.

If you’re fitting out on a budget, we currently have a graded Adler AD1000-DPSO-30 passthrough dishwasher at £2,044 + VAT and a graded Blizzard STORM40DP 400mm glasswasher at £808 + VAT, both with a 1 year parts warranty. Take a look at our graded catering equipment for more. (Prices and stock correct at time of publishing, and graded stock is limited.)

Fast Free UK Mainland Delivery is available across our range.

Source: Horticultural Trades Association (HTA) Market Update, August 2026, reported via FloralDaily.