Chicago · NFPA 96 kitchen exhaust cleaning
Your hood cleaned. Your certificate in hand.
Full-system kitchen exhaust cleaning for Chicago restaurants and bars — hood, filters, duct run, fan, and rooftop grease. Every visit ends with dated photos and the compliance certificate your fire inspector and insurer will ask for.
What the fire code requires
Chicago follows NFPA 96, which sets mandatory exhaust-cleaning intervals by cooking type — and requires the cleaning certificate to be kept on the premises.
| Kitchen type | Required cleaning | Visits per year |
|---|---|---|
| Wood or charcoal cooking (solid fuel) | Monthly | 12 |
| 24-hour kitchen | Every 3 months | 4 |
| 16-hour kitchen | Every 6 months | 2 |
| Light-duty cooking | Annually | 1 |
Intervals are set by cooking volume and grease output, not seating or square footage. Not sure where your kitchen falls? Ask — it takes one conversation.
The paperwork is half the job
Most hood cleaners leave an invoice. When the fire marshal or your insurance carrier asks for proof, an invoice is not proof.
Dated before-and-after photographs of the hood, duct, and fan. A written service record. And the compliance certificate — delivered to you, ready to hand to an inspector without digging through a drawer.
Your next service date is scheduled before we leave, matched to your kitchen’s required interval — so you are never out of compliance because nobody was watching the calendar.
What a full-system clean covers
Hood & filters
Degreased to bare metal — the canopy, baffle filters, and everything the health inspector sees first.
Duct run
The full run from hood to roof, where the grease you can’t see is the fire risk that matters most.
Exhaust fan & rooftop
Fan blades, housing, and rooftop grease containment — captured and disposed of legally, never into your roof drain.
Wastewater handled
Caustic grease runoff leaves with us for proper disposal. Nothing goes down your drains or into the storm sewer.
Run by someone who has run your side of it
HATCH is owner-operated by Kevin Hatcher — twenty-plus years in Chicago restaurants, bars, and stadium food service before ever picking up a pressure washer. He has managed the floor, worked the door, and closed the kitchen at 2am.
That means service that respects how your operation actually works: we clean after close, leave the line ready for morning prep, and never cost you a service hour. And when we say a date, we keep it — in this trade, that should not be a selling point, but ask around.
Request a quote
Tell us about your kitchen and Kevin will come scope it in person — hood count, duct run, and roof access decide the price, so quotes are done on site, free.