Nightly cleaning, kitchen exhaust service, and grease trap programs for multi-location groups across the five boroughs — scheduled around service, documented for FDNY and DOHMH.
NYC restaurants answer to two agencies with unrelated schedules, and most operators only discover the second one after a violation.
The Fire Department requires commercial kitchen exhaust systems to be inspected and cleaned at least once every three months. That is a floor, not a target — NFPA 96 sets monthly, quarterly, or semi-annual intervals based on how hard you actually cook. A wood-fired or high-volume fry line hits the monthly threshold long before the quarterly rule catches up with it.
In New York City, whoever cleans your exhaust system must personally hold a valid FDNY Certificate of Fitness for Commercial Kitchen Exhaust System Cleaning (F-64, or W-64 for the supervising holder). This is the detail that quietly invalidates a lot of cheap hood work: if the person on your roof is not certified, the cleaning does not count, and the paperwork will not hold up.
Health inspections are scored in violation points, and the score becomes the letter in your window. 0–13 points is an A. 14–27 is a B. 28 or more is a C. A public health hazard carries a minimum of 7 points on its own, a critical violation a minimum of 5, and a general violation a minimum of 2 — with more added for severity. Three general findings and one hazard can move you out of A territory in a single visit.
Score 14 or more on an initial inspection and you get the chance to fix conditions before being re-inspected, no sooner than seven days later. That week is when a documented deep clean is worth the most — and it is exactly when most operators are calling around for whoever can come fastest.
The same programs we run in LA, on New York’s intervals and paperwork.
Line, hood exterior, fryers, floors, and front-of-house reset after close. One crew standard whether the location is in Midtown or Williamsburg, so a group with six restaurants gets six identical results.
Scheduled to the interval your cooking volume actually demands, not the minimum. Certificate details and before/after photos filed against each visit, so the record exists before anyone asks for it.
Pumping on a set schedule with the disposal manifest retained per location — the document that matters when the question is whether the service happened, not whether you paid for it.
Pulling equipment, wall tile, floor drains, walk-in seals. Booked for the gap between a bad score and the re-inspection, or scheduled quarterly so that gap never opens.
The regulations are only half of it. The building is the other half, and it is the half that wrecks schedules.
Most Manhattan and brownstone-Brooklyn kitchens have no dock, no alley, and no service drive. Equipment comes through the dining room or up a freight elevator, which means crew size and kit have to be planned per address rather than per job type. A pressure washer that works in a Los Angeles strip mall is the wrong tool on the third floor of a mixed-use walk-up.
In high-rise and mixed-use buildings, building management controls when anything larger than a hand cart moves, and those windows rarely align with your slowest night. We book against the building calendar, not just yours, because a crew that cannot get equipment upstairs is a crew that did not show up.
Exhaust fans sit on shared roofs behind locked bulkheads controlled by landlords who are not party to your service contract. Confirming access before the truck rolls is the difference between a completed quarterly cleaning and a billable no-op.
Above nearly every NYC kitchen is somebody asleep. Night work has to be quiet work, which rules out some equipment entirely and changes how floors and hoods get done. Complaints escalate to the landlord, and landlords escalate to your lease.
New York groups run on documentation. Every visit we make is photographed, timestamped, and filed by location, so when FDNY or DOHMH asks what was done and when, the answer is already written down.
Also serving Los Angeles County — our largest market — and Miami. Practical guides for operators are in our resource library.