Find articles on kitchen exhaust cleaning, NFPA 96, compliance, fire safety, and commercial kitchen maintenance.
COMPLIANCE & REGULATIONS · SHARED KITCHEN VERTICAL A converted warehouse off I-35 in Dallas holds fourteen kitchen stalls. Nine are delivery-only brands, two are caterers, one is a meal-prep company, one is a food truck operator’s commissary, and one turned over last month. They share a roof, a duct trunk,
Who is actually responsible for kitchen exhaust cleaning in a leased restaurant — the lease, the fire code, the roof, and the clauses that keep both parties protected.
COMPLIANCE & REGULATIONS · SENIOR LIVING VERTICAL A 120-bed skilled nursing facility has a main production kitchen, three “country kitchens” on the memory care households with residential ranges, a bistro in the independent living wing, and a staff break room with a griddle somebody installed in 2019. Its residents can’t
OPERATIONS & REGULATIONS · HOSPITALITY VERTICAL A 400-room convention hotel in Dallas has a banquet kitchen that plates 1,200 dinners on Saturday and nothing on Tuesday, a signature restaurant leased to a celebrity chef’s group with its own vendors, a lobby café, a room service line, an employee cafeteria, a
OPERATIONS & REGULATIONS · CHAPTER 17 A taco trailer on South Congress, a crawfish rig outside a Lafayette festival, a brisket truck at a Fort Worth brewery, a tent kitchen feeding a state fair for eleven days — every one of them is a commercial kitchen on wheels or under
OPERATIONS & REGULATIONS · HIGHER EDUCATION VERTICAL A flagship university runs more commercial kitchens than most restaurant groups — residential dining halls feeding thousands a day, a dozen retail concepts, catering, faculty dining, and a stadium that serves eighty thousand people seven Saturdays a year. Most of it is operated
OPERATIONS & REGULATIONS · CHAPTER 14 A post-oak pit in Lockhart, a wood-fired oven in Santa Fe, a mesquite grill in San Antonio, a charcoal char-broiler in a Lafayette steakhouse — every one of them burns something that produces embers, and embers travel. NFPA 96 gives solid-fuel cooking its own
OPERATIONS & REGULATIONS · SECTION 8.1.1.1 Of every deficiency a fire marshal writes on a commercial kitchen rooftop, a missing hinge kit is the one operators most often haven’t heard of before the citation. It’s a small piece of hardware — a hinge, a cable, a prop — bolted to
COMPLIANCE & REGULATIONS · PRE-OPENING Most of what goes wrong with a kitchen exhaust system over the first five years was decided in the first five months — in the drawings, in the construction punch list, and in the ninety days after the doors opened. An access panel that wasn’t
OPERATIONS & REGULATIONS · FIRE PROTECTION A restaurant operator calls to schedule hood cleaning and asks, “Will you check the Ansul system while you’re up there?” It’s the most common question in the business, and the answer — no, that’s a different vendor, a different license, and a different code
OPERATIONS & REGULATIONS · SECTION 12.6.5 Every hood cleaning quote in the Southwest promises the same three words: cleaned to bare metal. It’s the phrase fire marshals listen for, the phrase insurance adjusters look for on the written report, and the phrase NFPA 96 uses to define what a compliant
OPERATIONS & REGULATIONS · FIRE RESPONSE The fire is out. The fire department has left. The kitchen is a mess and the phone is ringing with reservations you can’t honor. The question every operator asks in that moment is “how fast can we reopen?” — and the honest answer is
