Sazerac Rooftop, Midtown
A solid-fuel charbroiler under a Type I hood at a Midtown rooftop bar. Monthly cleaning cycle per NFPA-96 §11.6.1. Spark-arrestor replaced on schedule.
FR-2025-097 · Q4 close-out · Solid-fuel charbroiler · monthly cycle
The kitchen
Sazerac is a Midtown rooftop bar with a small but high-volume charbroiler line — a 36-inch live-fire grill running pecan and post-oak. Solid-fuel cooking equipment is on a stricter cleaning cycle under NFPA 96 §11.6.1: monthly, not quarterly. We have run Sazerac on a monthly cycle since they opened in March 2024.
What's different about solid-fuel
Two things. The grease load on the plenum is lower because the cooking medium is dry — but the carbon load is much higher. Carbon does not melt off under hot-water alkaline degreaser the way grease does; it has to be mechanically scrubbed off. The duct accumulates pyrolyzed deposits that, if ignited, will sustain a flame longer than grease does. Solid-fuel hoods also require a spark-arrestor screen between the cookline and the duct opening, and the screen has to be inspected at every cleaning and replaced when it clogs.
What we did this visit
Monthly visit. Sixty minutes. Cleaned the plenum and the duct riser to the first access panel. Replaced the spark-arrestor screen — at five months of high-volume service the screen had reached about 40% clog, which is past the IKECA replace-by threshold of 30%. Cleaned the fan housing. Took the hood-plane reading.
Dale Hesso, TDLR M-39184 · 2025-11-04 · 09:18 CT
Hood-plane reading: −0.027 in. w.c. · Spark-arrestor: replaced
The operator's standing concern
The bar's exhaust fan sits twelve feet from a residential balcony on the next building over. The condo association on that side has filed two odor complaints with the City of Houston in the past two years, both during evenings when the fan was running at peak load. We have helped Sazerac document — through quarterly capture-and-containment readings, smoke-pencil traces, and odor-emission flow modeling — that their installed system is operating within code, and the complaints have not progressed past the initial notice stage.
The bigger picture
Solid-fuel restaurants are a small subset of Houston commercial kitchens but a disproportionate share of the city's grease-fire incidents. The 2025 NFPA-96 revision tightened the solid-fuel rule largely in response to a national pattern; the U.S. Fire Administration has tracked an upward trend in restaurant fires originating in solid-fuel ventilation systems over the past decade.