Westchase ghost-kitchen hall

FR-2026-022 · Multi-tenant · Six hoods · Two roof fans

The site

The Westchase ghost-kitchen hall is a 14,000-square-foot facility off Beltway 8 housing six independent operators sharing common back-of-house infrastructure. Each tenant has a dedicated Type I hood. The six hoods feed into two manifolded duct runs that discharge through two roof-mounted Greenheck centrifugal upblast fans. The hall opened in January 2026; Updraft commissioned the system at the build stage.

The accounting problem

Multi-tenant ghost-kitchen halls have a structural reporting problem: when six operators share two exhaust fans, who is responsible for the duct cleaning, who is responsible for the rooftop fan service, and how is each tenant's NFPA-96 compliance documented separately when their grease loads physically commingle in the manifold? The answer we and the hall operator settled on: per-tenant cleaning of the hood and the dedicated drop, shared cleaning of the manifold and the fan, allocated by quarterly grease-load measurement at the manifold tee.

What we cleaned

Six hoods, six dedicated drops, two duct manifolds, two rooftop fans. Twelve sign-off cards — one per tenant for their hood, plus the two shared infrastructure cards stamped by the hall operator. Each tenant gets the photographs and gauge readings that pertain to their own equipment.

What we found

The two newest tenants — both opened in February — had visibly lighter grease loads than the four tenants who opened in January. The west manifold (which serves four tenants including the highest-volume operator, a Korean-fried-chicken concept) showed 1.4× the grease deposit of the east manifold. We adjusted the allocated cost split to reflect the actual measurement, which is the way we recommend hall operators bill for shared infrastructure.

What we wrote into the operator agreement

Three things, drawn from this site's planning months in 2025. First: every tenant must run their hood under capture-and-containment certification within thirty days of opening, regardless of when the hall as a whole gets its annual cert. Second: the hall operator pays for shared infrastructure cleaning and bills it back to tenants pro-rata by grease load, not pro-rata by square footage. Third: a fryer-fire incident in any tenant kitchen automatically triggers a full hall hood + duct cleaning within 48 hours, billed to the responsible tenant.

What we will be watching

Whether the west manifold's grease load continues to grow disproportionately. If the Korean-chicken concept stays at this volume, we will be on monthly cleaning by Q3 — a cost the tenant has been told to expect.