Your hood is cleaned. Can you prove it in thirty seconds?

A health grade tells you nothing about fire compliance. Different agency, different inspection, different penalties, and a location holding a clean A can fail an FDNY inspection comfortably.

The gap most restaurants have is not the work. It is the evidence that the work happened.

What gets asked for

• Kitchen hood suppression system service. The wet chemical system over your cooking line, and the tag on it.
• Portable fire extinguisher inspection. The tags, and whether anyone has actually looked at them since they were hung.
• Hood and duct cleaning. The grease removal, and the report from whoever did it.
• Certificates of fitness held by your staff, where they are required.

Service intervals are set by the equipment and by your certificate. Go by the tag on the system and the schedule your contractor works to, not by a rule of thumb someone gave you in a previous job.

The direction FDNY is moving

The expectation is shifting toward digital logs for hood cleanings, suppression system inspections and airflow corrections, along with access provisions like hinge kits so that ducts can actually be cleaned properly.

That second part is worth reading twice. A duct that cannot be opened cannot be cleaned, and "the contractor could not access it" is not a defence — it is a finding about your installation.

Fire code summonses are not cheap. They run from several hundred dollars into the thousands per summons, which makes the filing cabinet a genuinely good investment.

Why the records matter more than the work

Because on the day, nobody can see six months of maintenance. They can see a tag, a report, and whatever you can produce.

An operator who has the cleaning done every quarter and keeps nothing is in a materially worse position than one who does it on the same schedule and can hand over four dated reports. Same kitchen. Different outcome.

Where to keep them

Not in the office drawer. Not in the manager's email, because managers leave.

Somewhere the person on duty at 9pm on a Saturday can reach in under a minute, because that is when the inspection you did not plan for happens.

The test is simple and worth running on yourself: ask your closing manager, right now, to produce the last hood cleaning report. Time them.

The quarterly habit that fixes this

When a contractor finishes, three things happen before they leave:

1. Photograph the tag on the equipment they serviced.
2. Get the report in writing — email is fine, paper is fine.
3. File it against the obligation it satisfies, not in a general folder. "Hood suppression, serviced, next due —" with the date.

The third one is what turns a pile of paper into an answer. A folder of receipts is not evidence of compliance until somebody can say which requirement each one meets.