Outdoor kitchen and BBQ grill cleaning

Is professional grill cleaning worth it?

For a built-in grill, it’s worth it once you’ve seen under the burners. The lid comes up, the grates look fine after a brush, and everyone assumes the grill is clean. It isn’t. Every burger drips through the grates, past the heat shields and the burner tubes, and lands in the lower housing and the drip tray. On a grill that cooks every weekend, that’s a season of fat sitting a few inches under an open flame.

That layer is what causes the flare-up that chars the steaks. On a bad day it’s what catches, and a grease fire in the housing of a grill built into a wood deck or a covered porch is nobody’s idea of a fun evening. Getting it out cuts the fire risk more than anything else you can do to a grill.

In our opinion, a cart grill brushed after every cook is a fine thing to look after yourself. A big built-in with a rotisserie, a smoker box and a vent hood over it is a different machine, and it deserves a real teardown rather than a brush.

What’s included in an outdoor kitchen cleaning?

The whole island. We start at the top, because anything we knock loose falls down onto what we haven’t cleaned yet.

• Vent hood: filters out, the inside of the hood steamed and detailed, lights and fan tested. An outdoor hood over a grill loads up faster than a kitchen hood, because a grill throws a lot more smoke than a rangetop does.
• Grill: grates, warming rack, heat shields or briquette trays, burner tubes, the rotisserie burner, the lower housing and the drip tray. Everything that comes out, comes out.
• Side burner and griddle: grates off, burner cleared, griddle scraped and re-oiled.
• Doors and drawers: fronts polished with the grain, the insides wiped, the slides cleaned of the grit that makes them grind.
• Outdoor fridge: outside, gasket and the front grille, plus the coils where the unit lets us reach them.
• Sink and counters: the basin, the faucet and the stone or tile around the grill, where splatter has baked on.

The island in the photo at the top of this page is a DCS set into dark brick with a stainless vent hood the width of the grill above it. Look at the knobs and you’ll see rotisserie and smoker. That’s three separate places for grease to go, and each gets its own attention.

Built-in grills vs carts

A built-in grill is dropped into a masonry or steel island, which means the housing is surrounded on every side and the only way in is from the top or through the access doors. That’s where the time goes. Burners have to come out through the firebox, and the drip tray usually slides out from the front.

A cart grill is easier to reach but isn’t always simpler. We clean a Sedona by Lynx that lives on a cart on a composite deck, and it has a griddle insert sitting over half the grates, a rotisserie burner at the back and a pair of cabinet doors under it. Wheels just mean we can pull it away from the house railing to get at the back.

Brands matter less than people think outside, and more at the burners. Lynx, DCS, Kalamazoo, Wolf, Alfresco, Hestan and Twin Eagles all build the burners and heat shields differently, and the brand notes for the appliances we clean cover what changes inside the kitchen.

Kamado and ceramic grills

A Big Green Egg or a Kamado Joe is not a gas grill, and it doesn’t get cleaned like one. There’s no burner and no drip tray. The heat comes from lump charcoal in a firebox inside a thick ceramic shell, and the ceramic is the whole point. It holds heat, and it cracks if you shock it.

So no steam goes into the ceramic, and no water either. We pull the grates, the heat deflector and the fire ring, clear the old charcoal and the ash from the bottom, and clean the vent and the damper top. The inside of the dome gets burned off with a controlled fire and brushed dry once it’s cool. The grates and the stainless parts get the wet cleaning, on a drop cloth, away from the egg.

While the lid is open we look at the gasket and the metal bands. A flattened gasket leaks smoke and makes temperature hard to hold, and loose bands are how lids drop. We’ll tell you what we see; we don’t sell parts.

Salt air, winter and outdoor stainless

Outdoor stainless has a harder life than anything in your kitchen. Salt air near the water leaves a film on the grill, and that film pulls moisture in and starts small brown rust spots on the stainless, the kind people call tea staining. Pollen in the spring sticks to any grease on the lid. And a winter under a cover traps humidity against the metal for months.

That’s why timing matters more outside than it does indoors, and why there are really two different visits. One clears what a winter left behind: spider webs in the burner tubes and the venturi, damp ash, igniters that have stopped sparking. The other gets the grease out before the grill goes under a cover and sits. Grease left on stainless through a cold, wet stretch is how light staining turns into pitting, and a grill kept clean while it isn’t being used simply lasts longer. We look at the island, tell you what it needs, and set the schedule with you.

Coastal kitchens need it most. We clean a lot of islands at river and ocean houses on the New Jersey coast, at second homes that open for the summer, and on estate lots with full outdoor kitchens.

When a grill needs restoration instead

Sometimes a cleaning isn’t enough, and we’ll say so on the first look. Burner tubes caked so thick with carbon they’re close to twice their size, a lower housing full of a season of drippings, stainless with heat tint or pitting, a grill that won’t light on one side. That’s a restoration job: a full teardown, every part cleaned or checked, the stainless brought back as far as it can go.

It’s more work and a different quote, and the high-end BBQ restoration process has its own page with the before-and-after pairs from one of our jobs. The honest version is this: most built-in grills that look rough are restorable. A few aren’t. A burner rusted through is done, and we’ll tell you before you spend the money.

If there’s a pizza oven in the same island, the pizza oven side of the visit fits into the same day. Inside the house, the range gets the oven steam clean we do indoors. Snap the grill with the lid up and the grates pulled, and we’ll plan the island around what that picture shows.