SPECIFYING STAINLESS FOR COMMERCIAL AND RESIDENTIAL KITCHENS

Commercial kitchens are wet, hot, caustic and busy. Surfaces have to take chopping, dragging of pots and daily chemical cleaning without staining or harbouring food. That is why stainless — usually 304, with a consistent brushed finish — remains the default for benches, splashbacks, shelving and exhaust canopies.

Residential kitchens are kinder, but they are not exempt. A home barbecue island, a butler’s pantry or a wet bar still sees acid, salt and heat. The difference is often in the detailing: thinner splashbacks, tighter integration with joinery, and finishes chosen to sit next to stone rather than next to a coolroom.

We fabricate both. The product list is the same family — flat benches, wet benches, sink benches, cabinet benches, hot and cold bars, exhaust hoods, pot racks, shelving, wall panels — but the edges, upstands and under-shelving change with the brief. A café wet bench is not a home island with a tap in it.

A flat bench is the simplest plane in the room and the easiest to get wrong. Thickness, front edge profile, under-shelf or pot-rack options, and how the top meets the wall all affect cleaning. Wet benches and sink benches add falls, waste positions and splash control. If the waste is in the wrong place, you will fight standing water for the life of the fit-out.

Exhaust hoods are a different problem: volume, grease, access for cleaning, and coordination with the mechanical contractor. We build the canopy; the extract performance still has to match the cooking equipment under it. Send us the equipment schedule with the drawing.

Hot bars, cold bars and cabinet benches sit in the service line. They have to align with existing servery heights, sneeze guards and refrigeration. BBQ work is often outdoor and therefore closer to 316 and to architectural detailing than to a back-of-house bench. Tell us which of those worlds you are in before we fold the first sheet.

Food-grade fabrication means continuous welds where dirt would collect, radiused internal corners where a square fold would trap residue, and fixings that can be cleaned around. Silicone is not a substitute for a properly formed upstand. A gap behind a splashback will become a health report.

We follow Australian practice for food premises metalwork: materials that can be sanitised, joints that do not harbour waste, and surfaces that do not flake. If your certifier or food-safety adviser has a written standard for the fit-out, send it with the RFQ. It is cheaper to detail it in the shop than to grind it on a live site.

On-site welding still has a place in kitchens — closing a run of benches, dropping a hood, or tying new work into an existing line. That is a planned visit, not a way to hide a drawing that never closed.

Plan, elevations and a services layout are the minimum. Mark sink bowls, waste points, set-down heights and any under-bench appliances. If the room is a renovation, photographs of the existing line save a site visit. If it is a new café, the equipment list matters as much as the architectural set.

Say whether you need installation. A crate of benches that nobody has planned to set, seal and level is not a finished kitchen. Our installation and repairs service exists for that last metre, including later modifications when the menu changes and a bench has to move.

S&Y has been building this class of work for more than twenty years from Minto, for restaurants, institutions and homes. If you already know the product — a sink bench, a hood, a cold bar — start on that service page. If you only know the room, send the drawings and we will break it into fabricatable pieces.