We clean behind the cooking equipment

We clean the wall behind your equipment

A hood cleaning takes care of the hood and the exhaust above it. The grease does not stay up there. It runs down the back wall and drips behind the fryers. Then it gets carried across the floor on every pair of shoes that walks through. Commercial kitchen cleaning is the rest of the room. We clean the back wall from the floor up to the hood. We also clean behind the equipment, including the gas lines, and the floors and floor mats.

Nobody looks at the back wall during a shift, so it gets cleaned the least. From across the kitchen it looks fine. Up close there is a tan film on it, heaviest near the top where the hot air rises off the cooking. We clean it from the floor to the bottom edge of the hood. When the wall is properly clean, the seams are clear and your hand comes away clean instead of tacky.

Behind the equipment is where a kitchen is dirtiest, because nobody can reach it while the kitchen is running. Food drops back there and grease drips down onto it, and it all sits in the heat. The gas lines behind the ranges and fryers collect a coat of grease and dust that nobody touches for months. We clean behind the equipment and the gas lines too. That buildup is fuel sitting right next to an open flame.

• Back wall cleaned from floor to hood
• Behind the equipment, including the gas lines
• Floors cleaned wall to wall, corners included
• Floor mats cleaned, with the floor under them
• Free inspection before any work is agreed

We clean the walls before the floors

Order matters in a kitchen, because everything you take off a wall ends up on the floor. So we start at the top and work down. The back wall gets cleaned first, from the bottom of the hood down to the floor. Then we work behind the equipment. The floors come after that, once there is nothing left above them to drip. Doing it the other way round means cleaning the floor twice.

Grease that has been on a wall for a while does not wipe off. It needs a degreaser and enough time to soak into the buildup and soften it before anyone scrubs. Skip the soak and all the scrubbing does is spread the grease into a thin smear, and that smear dries into a fresh film. Heavy spots get scraped first. The rinse after the scrub is what carries the loosened grease away.

Kitchen sanitation comes at the end of the job, not the start. A disinfectant cleaner cannot work on a surface still under a layer of grease, because the grease shields whatever is living underneath it. So the surfaces get degreased and rinsed first, and the disinfectant goes on after that. A kitchen sprayed with sanitizer over old grease smells clean for a day and is still dirty underneath.

Phoenix heat bakes grease onto kitchen walls

Phoenix summers run well past a hundred degrees outside, and the wall behind a fryer runs hotter still. Grease that lands on a cool wall stays soft and wipes off. Grease that lands on a hot wall cooks. Over a summer it turns into a hard amber coat that feels like varnish when you run a fingernail across it. That coat will not come off with a quick wipe. It takes soak time and patient scrubbing.

A lot of Phoenix restaurants sit in strip centers and older concrete block buildings. The kitchen wall is usually block covered with stainless steel sheet or white plastic wall panels. Both clean up well when they are in good shape. The trouble is at the seams and the loose edges. Grease works in behind a lifted panel, or into bare block that was only painted, and it keeps seeping back out after the face is clean. We look for those spots before we start.

Then there is the dust. Every time the back door opens, fine desert dust blows in, and a summer monsoon storm can push a wall of it across the city. Dust sticks to a greasy surface and turns into a gritty brown paste. That paste holds even more grease, so a wall that has gone a while without cleaning gets dirty faster than a clean one. The same paste packs into the gaps behind the equipment and around the gas lines.

Greasy floor mats make the floor slippery

Commercial kitchen floors are usually quarry tile or sealed concrete. Grease settles into the grout lines and into the corner where the floor meets the wall. A mop does not get it out. It moves the grease from one spot to the next and leaves a thin coat that gets slicker with every shift. The floor has to be scrubbed and the dirty water picked up, not left to dry where it lands.

Floor mats do their job by catching what falls, and that is also the problem. The holes in a rubber mat fill up with food and grease, and the floor under it stays wet and dark. When we clean the floor, the mats come up first. The mats get cleaned on their own while the floor under them gets the same scrub as the rest of the kitchen. Nothing goes back down on a wet floor.

Skip the mats and a clean floor does not stay clean for long. The grease trapped under them works its way back out and gets tracked into the walk-in cooler and out toward the dining room. That film is what people slip on. A mat laid back down on a wet floor causes its own trouble, because the water under it has nowhere to go. That corner stays damp and starts to smell.