Restaurants are substantially different from other types of properties for a few reasons. The main reason is their concrete gets dirtiest the fastest. If you own a shopping center or manage one, you will notice your vape shops, boutiques, nail salons don’t get nearly as dirty as that one restaurant. Essentially that one restaurant is the reason you may be cleaning the entire complex! Restaurants will also be the reason you see grease drip lines trailing towards your dumpster. So with restaurants it is critical to have regular maintenance on your concrete so that the property stays maintained and safe to use.
Entry areas are obviously the first thing a customer sees before they enter the restaurant. And because it is so frequently used, grease from inside the building will be tracked outside and the concrete will eventually turn black. Once it is black it is not just ugly but is now a slip hazard and this is an area that should be getting cleaned on every maintenance wash. One way to prevent this from getting so bad is to frequently mop the inside of the restaurant, to prevent grease from tracking outside. But as a high volume store sometimes this is hard to do as frequently as necessary and inevitably you will have grease on the concrete.
But the one place it is always worse than the front entrance is the back door of the restaurant. One thing to really emphasize in training employees is how to not drag the trash back when taking it to the dumpster. It is very common to see black drip stains on the concrete trailing directly to the dumpster and this is something we see even with our own customers frequently. This can be fixed with a power washer but some prevention can help reduce the frequency needed for maintenance.
Restaurants with a drive thru, these are a magnet for gum and spilt drinks. If you have a busy drive thru you may even want to incorporate the drive thru and sidewalks as a whole cleaning package. In many instances we will see the drive thru get dirtier than the sidewalks. The majority of what is being cleaned are the track marks left behind vehicles, spilt drinks and gum. There are also frequent oil stains from where the cars stop at the order station and the window where they acquire their food. Keep in mind oil stains don’t go away. But if it isn’t washed regularly the oil will spread and make the concrete worse.
Kitchen exhaust systems are a whole other animal but I will cover it briefly. We washed vent hoods for a year and decided it wasn’t a business we wanted to continue doing and we no longer provide the service. But as a restaurant this is a legally required service that you need done regularly. In some cities even fire marshall will pay you a visit to ensure this is getting done so it is important to stay up to date when you get your exhaust systems cleaned. And for the sake of insurance it is important to use a company who is certified by the NFP96 when you are choosing your service provider, this will be important in the event you ever have a kitchen fire and it is traced back to your kitchen exhaust systems. It is also important to check and make sure the contractor is insured specifically to wash vent hood systems, a standard general liability does not cover incidents from kitchen exhaust incidents and this should be checked prior to making a decision on who you are going to use. And when you get a maintenance schedule, stick with it. The worst thing that can happen is the fire marshall can actually shut your business down if you are deviating from a maintenance schedule they deem appropriate. If you are a new restaurant owner it would be good to consult with your local fire marshall’s office to ensure you are locally compliant and don’t suffer any incidents.
It is important to know that most companies who pressure wash concrete and buildings don’t clean kitchen exhaust systems, and most kitchen exhaust cleaning companies rarely clean properties. Finding a company that does it all in our industry is extremely uncommon because they are two entirely different businesses who just happen to use a power washer as their tool for the work performed.
As far as window cleaning goes, as much as I would like to say use a cleaning company to do them. But being a former restaurant employee I am aware there are slow periods of the day (between 2 PM and 5 PM where I worked) that were designated times for property maintenance. And employees will be able to clean the windows for you. Now there are some restaurants that are so busy they don’t have this luxury and in that case we recommend using a window cleaning company to handle the maintenance of cleaning your windows.
Parking lot striping is another hot topic with restaurants. And like vent hoods, striping is something that can be enforced by the fire marshall’s office if it is not up to city code. They can shut down a business if they deem the business unsafe for use because of inadequate fire lanes and other necessary markings for the property. And when you need striping done, prior to that happening the existing paint needs to be power washed prior to striping. Some places save money by only power washing where the striping will go, but it does make a noticeable difference and anyone can tell that the parking lot is dirty when only the area around the striping is actually clean which can be an eye sore. This is one of the instances where washing the entire parking lot will make sense when planning on striping. Some striping companies even offer the power washing service prior to painting, but keep in mind it is rare that power washing is their main business function so results can be very unpredictable when doing this.
The next thing I want to mention is scheduling around other contractors. If you are planning on having more dirt or re-bedding flower beds, it is important to do this AFTER power washing. The soil is very loose when first planted so if the vegetation is placed right before a scheduled washing, a lot of the dirt and sometimes the whole plant will uproot and it will cause a huge mess (and a loss of dirt and flowers). If you are planning on putting in new plants or more dirt, plan on doing it immediately after the property has been power washed so the vegetation has time to settle. Within a month on the next cleaning job this won’t be an issue.
The next thing I'm going to cover is more of a headache on our end, and it isn’t common but it does happen. If you are having a power washing company come to your site, make sure you have a water source. It is not cost effective for either party for the contractor to have to transport the water (you will be billed about 100 times more than what the water used will actually cost you which is generally less than a dollar per job). It is important to know where your running water is located outside. If there is no water source outside the contractor will need to get water from somewhere, so work somewhere in the schedule where they can access water from the kitchen if there is absolutely no water source outside of your facility so that the work can be done. This is particularly common with restaurants located in a large shopping center (some shopping centers will have no working water sources on the outside, I still haven’t found out the reason why).
Some people wonder if different foods create a bigger mess than others that are harder to clean. And the results vary in all honesty. I can say that Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants are harder to clean because they use a different type of oil in their food and generally require more work to clean. The main thing is frequency. If your restaurant is relatively slow or medium volume then the cost for washing shouldn’t be substantial. If your business has a line out the door every day the work will be more expensive because the property will be more dirty from frequency of use. This works out because a higher volume restaurant knows they will have a higher cost of doing business when volume is so high, and vice versa for a smaller restaurant that doesn’t have a large volume. If a cleaning company is wanting to charge a restaurant that has 50 customers a day the same as a customer that has 1500 customers a day I would say something is off about the pricing model because the amount of work will be substantially different between the two.
The last thing I want to cover is scheduling. This is a very critical part because this is something that can create problems for everyone. To start, if you are a 24/7 operation plan on the cost being higher than a restaurant that closes at 9 PM or even has one day a week they aren’t open. It is more difficult to work when we have customers coming and going with our crew working, so it is important for us to be able to clean at a time when the restaurant is least busy or even closed. Also if your restaurant opens at 7 AM and closes at 2 AM like many bar and grills, there is a very small window to clean. If the work can ONLY be done when the establishment is closed this does cause the cost to go up because there is a limited window in a tight schedule to fit this work in (also its harder to find people who want to work at 3 in the morning). Another huge obstacle that no one seems to consider is the type of area it is in. I have had the Houston Police Department shut our operation down at 4 in the morning when washing a restaurant off Montrose in Houston because we had a noise complaint. Our equipment generates noise. If you are a restaurant in an area like Montrose, the Heights or anywhere that is adjacent to residential areas this will be a problem. In this case we had to find a time during the day that the restaurant was either slow or not busy. We began doing work at 8 in the morning for these restaurants so that we could get it washed before the doors open and our goal was to be out by the time the business opened. For restaurants on a highway this isn’t a problem since everyone is used to the frequent noise.
In conclusion, there is a lot more to washing a restaurant than just having a guy power wash concrete, this is an entire industry within itself. Schedule a free property walkthrough and maintenance quote today. We’ll build a cleaning plan that keeps your restaurant safe, compliant, and customer-ready year-round.