High-End BBQ Grill Restoration

What’s the difference between a cleaning and a restoration?

Time, and how far apart the grill comes. A cleaning is maintenance. It takes out a season or two of grease and carbon, the parts go back in the same way, and the grill cooks the way it did last year.

A restoration is for the grill that stopped cooking the way it used to. One side won’t light. The flame is yellow and lazy instead of blue. Flare-ups every time the fat drips. It’s often a grill that came with the house, or one that sat under a cover for three winters while nobody used it.

For that grill, everything comes out and each part gets judged on its own: clean it, or flag it for replacement. Then it all goes back together and has to pass a test: every burner lights, the flame is even, and the grill comes up to heat. Honestly, we’d rather keep a grill clean than bring one back from the dead, but a lot of the grills we meet are already on the second path.

What we take apart

A built-in gas grill is a stack of parts, and grease works down through all of them. We take them out top to bottom and lay them on a drop cloth in order:

• Cooking grates and the warming rack
• Heat shields, flavorizer bars, or briquette and ceramic trays, depending on the maker
• Burner tubes, with the venturi checked for spider webs and the ports cleared one by one
• The rotisserie and infrared burners at the back, where the grill has them
• Igniters, electrodes and the collector boxes around them
• The drip tray, the grease cup and finally the lower housing itself

On one of our jobs, pictured on the homepage, the burner tubes had carbon on them so thick they looked close to twice their real diameter. Gas can’t get out of a port that’s buried, which is why the grill cooked unevenly. Under them, the lower housing held what looked like a full season of drippings mixed with ash. Both came back to bare metal the same afternoon, the burners were test-fired, and the drain in the housing was clear again.

Stainless restoration: heat tint, tea staining and salt pitting

Stainless steel isn’t stain-proof, it’s stain-resistant, and a grill tests that harder than anything else outside. There are three different problems, and they don’t get treated the same.

Heat tint is the gold, blue or brown rainbow on the lid and around the burners. It’s the surface oxidizing from heat. On most grills it can be worked back with the right cleaner and pad, always along the grain.

Tea staining is the brown speckle that shows up near the water or after a damp winter. It’s surface rust starting where salt and grime sit on the metal. It comes off with patience, and a clean grill resists it much better afterwards.

Pitting is what tea staining turns into when it’s left. Tiny craters, metal actually gone. We can clean the pits and polish around them so the surface reads even, but a pitted lid will always be a pitted lid up close. The finish comes back to the grain, not to the showroom, and we’d rather tell you that before we start.

Brands we restore

Most of the grills we restore are built-ins from Lynx, DCS, Kalamazoo, Wolf, Alfresco, Hestan and Twin Eagles, plus Viking outdoor units and bigger Weber gas grills. No two of them stack their parts the same way. Burner shapes differ, the shields or trays over them differ, and so does the way grease is meant to leave the housing. That’s why we photograph the grill before the first screw comes out, and why a part that needs replacing should be the maker’s part for that model, not a generic tube that almost fits.

We name the brands so you know we’ve worked on yours. We don’t sell for any of them.

What we can’t fix

This is the section most restoration companies leave out. Some grills are done.

A burner tube rusted through, with holes where there should be ports, gets replaced, not cleaned. Cracked cast-aluminum housings and fireboxes can’t be welded back into a safe grill. Any gas valve that sticks or leaks is a job for a licensed gas technician, and we’ll stop and say so. And a grill so old that parts no longer exist is sometimes a cheaper replacement than a restoration.

We’ll give you that answer on the first inspection, with photos of what we found, before any money is spent on a grill that should be retired.

How long does a restoration take?

Plan on a full day for most built-in grills. The teardown and the housing are the slow part, and years of carbon can mean several rounds of scraping. Add a side burner, a rotisserie or a vent hood above the grill and it can stretch into a second visit, especially if a part has to be ordered.

Restoration is one piece of what we do for the whole outdoor island, and a pizza oven next to the grill can be cleaned out the same day as the grill. A lot of this work is at houses near the water on the New Jersey side, at summer places closed up all winter and in waterfront estate kitchens in New York, where salt does the most damage. The fastest way to find out if yours is worth saving: pull the grates, shine a light into the housing, and text us what you see.