Everything here comes back to grease
A commercial kitchen is not a difficult building to maintain because it is complicated. It is difficult because one substance gets into everything and then behaves the same way every time.
It coats the inside of drain lines until they block. It accumulates in extract ducts until they pull less air and become a fire risk. It gets onto floors, where it becomes a slip hazard for people carrying hot pans. It fouls refrigeration coils and shortens compressor life.
The useful consequence is that almost nothing here is a surprise. The failures are predictable, they are on a rough interval driven by cooking volume, and they are all cheaper on a schedule than at 7 PM on a Friday.
The window is between close and prep
Kitchens have the tightest maintenance window of any building type on this site. Service ends late, prep starts early, and both of them are immovable.
That constrains scope more than anything else. Work has to be sized to actually finish inside the gap, and anything requiring a long dry time, a full water shutdown or a large equipment move is better taken on a planned closure than started at midnight.
It also means notice matters. A kitchen can accommodate almost any work with warning and almost none of it without.
Refrigeration is a different risk from comfort cooling
Elsewhere on this site, HVAC failing is uncomfortable. Here, a walk-in failing overnight is stock on the floor and a conversation with an inspector.
The failure modes are limited and repeatable. Door seals go first - a seal that no longer closes properly makes the unit run continuously, which raises the bill, ices the evaporator and works the compressor toward an early death. Defrost cycles stop and the evaporator ices over. Drains block and refreeze.
Every one of those is visible on a scheduled visit and cheap to correct at that point. The reason walk-ins fail catastrophically is almost never that the fault was undetectable - it is that nobody was looking.
Ventilation decides whether the kitchen works
Extract and make-up air are usually discussed as a compliance item, and they are, but the day-to-day argument is simpler.
A loaded duct pulls less air. Less extract means heat and smoke stay in the room, the kitchen becomes harder to work in, and the grease that is not being extracted lands on surfaces instead. Staff notice this long before an inspector does.
Balance matters as much as cleanliness. Extract without adequate make-up air pulls the kitchen negative, which makes doors hard to open, drags conditioned air out of the dining room and can affect appliance performance.
Waste has paperwork
Grease trap servicing needs a licensed hauler and a manifest for the waste. It is not a plumbing task and treating it as one creates a disposal problem rather than solving a maintenance one.
We schedule it with a licensed hauler and keep the paperwork with the rest of the record, because it is the sort of thing that is only ever asked for at an inconvenient moment.