Commercial Kitchens and Cleanliness

As one part of our business we are commercial kitchen cleaners and even after all these years of being involved two things still amaze me. The first is how bad some of our kitchens are and the second is the behaviour of the owners of these premises. Now this is not an indictment of all our commercial kitchens only a small number of them. The problem is you never know which is which! I know that as a society we are obsessed with cleanliness and destroying all traces of bacteria from our surfaces which has led to all sorts of other problems not to be gone into here but there are limits of acceptability and I will relate just one recent example to demonstrate what I mean.
We are regularly called in to clean a restaurant kitchen which has just changed ownership. The new owners will invariably spend thousands of pounds on refurbishing the dining and bar areas; the front of house! But when it comes to the kitchen they will often try to salvage everything in the kitchen by having it all cleaned. This is not a bad idea as refitting a kitchen can run into tens of thousands of pounds so spending a few thousand on cleaning makes economic sense and work for us!
Very recently we were called into one such restaurant. Previously it had been a thriving and medium priced place to eat but was ultimately closed down by Environmental Health. New owners call us to provide a quote. We arrive to find the whole front of house being ripped apart and rebuilt. Carpenters, plasterers, glaziers, and painters were all hard at work. We were ushered into the kitchen were no work was going on. With a sweep of the arm the owner informed us that a company had spent three days working on it and only succeeded on half cleaning the cooker hood before walking away from it! So we looked around. Quite frankly it was disgusting, freezers still had rotting food in them, the ceiling and walls were yellow with dark fat flows running down them, the filters stuck to you on touching and the ducting was full of dark very old fat. Everything was quite disgusting! However with careful cleaning it could be restored.
Then the moment of truth came; the owner asking what sort of cost we would put on the cleaning. Whilst viewing I had come to a rough calculation that it would take 4 experienced kitchen cleaners two full days giving an approximate cost of £1500 and this I told the owner. Laughing he told me that he had a quote 'in writing' for £450. Consequently he was told he could call us when the second company failed to deliver! This owner was either a complete novice with no experience or a charlatan hoping to get his kitchen cleaned piecemeal for nothing as various companies started and then walked out!
It is accepted that clients will generally go for the lowest quote but anybody with a couple of brain cells to rub together would understand that you could not get the extractors and ducting cleaned for £450 let alone the whole kitchen!
This is one restaurant that I will not being going anywhere near when it does open, unless of course we do eventually get called in! Updates on this are available on our weblog, Twitter and Facebook. If any restaurateurs are interested in using this obviously very competitive cleaning company then do not hesitate to contact me.