BinderIs the landlord or the tenant responsible for hood cleaning?
There are two questions here and they get conflated constantly. Who is contractually responsible is decided by your lease. Who gets asked when an inspector is standing in the kitchen is decided by who is operating it. Those are frequently different people, and the second question does not wait for the first to be resolved.
What leases typically do
There is no standard split, which is the root of the problem. Common arrangements, all of which appear regularly:
- Tenant handles everything inside the demised premises, including the hood, the suppression system and the extinguishers, with the landlord retaining building systems such as sprinkler and alarm.
- Landlord handles anything penetrating the building envelope, which can put rooftop fans and vertical duct runs on their side while the hood itself stays with the tenant. This split produces the worst outcomes, because a system gets cleaned in two halves by two companies on two schedules.
- Triple net, tenant handles all of it, often including systems the tenant has no access to.
- Silence. Genuinely common, particularly in older leases and in conversions where the kitchen was added later.
Why silence is a problem for you rather than for the landlord
When a lease does not allocate an obligation, nothing about the fire code changes. The requirement attaches to the premises and the operation, and the person operating a commercial kitchen is the one an inspector addresses. An unallocated obligation tends to become the tenant's in practice, because the tenant is the one present when the question is asked.
What to do, in order
- Read the lease for each system separately. Hood, suppression, extinguishers, sprinkler, alarm, grease interceptor, backflow. Do not assume one clause covers them all, because they are frequently split.
- For anything the landlord holds, ask for copies of the reports in writing, and ask for it as a standing arrangement rather than a one-off. This is the step that gets skipped and it is the whole point. An inspector asking about your sprinkler cycle will not accept that the landlord has it somewhere.
- For anything genuinely unallocated, propose an allocation in writing. Even an email agreeing who books the work is far better than an unresolved gap, and most landlords will engage because their building is the asset at risk.
- For split systems, establish who cleans to where. A hood cleaner needs to know whether the vertical duct and the fan are in scope. Get it in the scope of work rather than discovering it from a photograph.
The one that catches people
Grease interceptors serving multiple tenants in a shared building are a frequent source of dispute, because the local sewer authority usually holds the operating food service establishment responsible while the equipment is shared and landlord-owned. If you are in a food hall or a multi-tenant building, resolve this before you need to.
This page describes what published standards say. It is not legal advice and it is not a determination about any premises. The requirements that apply to your building, including how often work must be done and what must be kept, are set by your authority having jurisdiction, which is usually your local fire marshal or health department. Where this page and your inspector disagree, your inspector is right.
Keeping this straight without thinking about it
Binder records history against the location, so reports from a landlord's contractor and reports from your own sit in one timeline. Forwarding the landlord's annual sprinkler report into your location's address is enough to make it produceable when somebody asks you rather than them.
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