Restaurant Roof Repair On Your Hours, Not Ours

Grease Is What Makes This Different

Every commercial flat roof in Cook County takes weather. A restaurant roof takes weather plus the exhaust from your kitchen, and the exhaust is what kills it early. Cooking grease that gets past a filter goes up the duct and lands on the membrane around the exhaust curb, spreading a little farther every shift. On a TPO or EPDM roof that grease attacks the plasticizers in the sheet. The membrane goes soft, then brittle, then it splits, usually right where the field meets the curb flashing.

You can see it from the ground on a lot of buildings: a dark halo around the exhaust fan that the rain never washes off. On roofs where nobody has ever cleaned around the curb, we find membrane you can push a finger through within about eight feet of the fan while the rest of the field still has a decade left. That is a repair, not a replacement, if somebody catches it.

What We Do At The Exhaust Curbs

Fixing a grease-damaged curb properly means dealing with the grease first. New membrane will not weld or bond to a contaminated surface, and a patch stuck over grease releases within a season. So the sequence is:

• Degrease and clean the affected field well past the visible damage, because contamination spreads farther than the discoloration shows.
• Cut out compromised membrane and wet insulation underneath. Grease soaked insulation stays wet and rots the deck under it.
• Rebuild the curb flashing with new material welded or bonded to clean substrate, with the flashing carried high enough on the curb to matter.
• Add a grease containment pan or an absorbent guard at the fan when the equipment allows, so the next round of drips lands somewhere replaceable.
• Where the whole area around a hood exhaust is shot, a coating or a sacrificial walk pad section gives you a surface that can be renewed without opening the roof again.

We will also tell you plainly if the problem is the hood cleaner, not the roof. Duct systems that have not been cleaned on schedule dump far more grease onto the roof than a properly serviced one, and no roof repair outruns that. Fixing the membrane without fixing the source buys you two years instead of fifteen.

Rooftop Units, Curbs And Every Other Penetration

The typical Chicagoland restaurant roof is a small field completely crowded with equipment: make-up air unit, condensers, hood exhaust fans, refrigeration lines, gas lines on blocks, plumbing vents, a satellite dish somebody added in 2009. Every one of those is a hole in the roof with a detail around it, and details are where flat roofs leak. The open field almost never fails first.

So when you call us about a stain over the dining room, we do not go looking directly above it. On a low slope roof water travels between the membrane and the deck before it finds a fastener hole or a deck seam and drops. We check the RTU curbs, the pitch pans around refrigeration lines, the seams that got cut when a unit was replaced, and the drains and scuppers that have not been cleared since the last owner.

Rooftop unit replacements are worth calling out. When an HVAC contractor swaps a unit, the roof around that curb gets opened and put back, and the quality of that repair varies wildly. If you have work planned on your equipment, having a roofer close the roof properly afterward is cheap insurance.

Leak Response When The Health Inspector Matters

Water coming through a ceiling in a food prep area is a violation waiting to be written. It does not matter that it is clean rainwater by the time you see it, because it is not clean by then. It has run across a roof and through insulation. Inspectors treat overhead leaks in prep and storage areas seriously, and they should.

That is why we treat restaurant leak calls as urgent even when the leak is small. Angelo has sent crews out overnight and in bad weather for exactly this kind of call. A temporary patch stops the water and buys the time to do the permanent repair on a schedule that does not cost you a service. We document the temporary work with photos so the permanent fix and any insurance claim both have a record.

Overnight And Off-Hours Scheduling

Roof work over an operating kitchen is noisy and it drops debris. Neither of those belongs over a lunch rush. We build restaurant schedules around service, which usually means starting after close or before open, working the window between the last cover and the first delivery, and having the roof closed and the area clear before staff arrive.

For repairs that need daytime hours, we phase the work so the section over the dining room and the section over the kitchen never happen while either is in use. On strip center locations we coordinate staging with the neighboring tenants and the property manager. If your building has a landlord who owns the roof, we write the scope so everyone sees whose responsibility is whose.

Straight Pricing And What Comes Next

Satellite measurements give us a realistic range on most restaurant roofs over the phone, and an on-roof look firms the number before anything is signed. We quote repairs as repairs. If the field around your hood is gone but the rest of the roof has years in it, we will say that instead of selling you a full replacement, and if the roof genuinely is finished we will show you the photos that prove it. Financing help is available on larger scopes.

The cheapest thing a restaurant owner can do is put the roof on a schedule: twice a year, plus after any big storm, someone walks the curbs and clears the drains. See completed commercial work in the gallery, or get us out for a look through the contact page. We repair restaurant roofs in Chicago, Cicero and Oak Lawn and across the Cook, DuPage and Will county area.