Wynwood ยท 33127
Restaurants and breweries in buildings that were warehouses, where the drainage was never designed for what it now carries.
Almost every Wynwood building started life as something else, and the plumbing shows it. Warehouse drainage sized for a wash-down hose now serves a kitchen doing three hundred covers, and a brewery pushing spent liquor through a line that was never meant for it. The result is a district with more grease and drainage work per building than anywhere else we cover.
The second complication is that most of it is visible. Exposed ceilings mean pipework is part of the room a customer sits in, so a repair has to look deliberate as well as work.
What we get called for here
What is different here
Plenty of Wynwood buildings still run their original cast iron below slab, now carrying a restaurant load it was never sized for. Recurring blockages in that situation are a capacity and condition problem, not a cleaning problem, and a camera inspection tells you which you have before you spend money clearing the same line a fourth time.
With this density of kitchens and breweries, grease lines and traps drive most of the work. Hydro-jetting clears these properly where a cabled auger tends to punch a hole through the blockage and leave the walls of the pipe coated, which is why the same line reopens within weeks.
When the ceiling is the mechanical system, a repair is visible to every customer in the room. Runs get routed neatly, secured properly and painted to match where that helps. Tell us it is a customer-facing space and we scope the finish as part of the job rather than as an extra.
In practice
A Wynwood fit-out usually starts with a shell that has a single restroom, a hose bib and a floor drain, and ends with a full commercial kitchen. Everything in between has to be cut, routed and connected to drainage that was laid for a different building. The unknown is always what is actually under the slab, because the drawings either do not exist or describe a layout that was altered decades ago.
We would rather core a small inspection opening and run a camera before anyone prices the work than quote optimistically and discover the run goes the wrong way. It adds a day at the start and it routinely saves a fortnight in the middle, which on a fit-out with a signed opening date is the difference that matters.
Grease interception is the other thing worth settling early. Traps get inherited from the previous tenant and sized for whatever that concept produced, so a bar becoming a full kitchen frequently finds itself with an undersized trap and a pump-out schedule that cannot keep up. Getting the interception right during the fit-out is straightforward. Retrofitting it into a trading restaurant with a finished floor is not.
Common questions
Usually because it is being cleared rather than fixed. In converted buildings the line is often original, undersized for the current kitchen, or damaged. A camera inspection tells you which, and we would rather say a line needs replacing than clear it again every six weeks. See hydro-jetting.
Yes. Breweries put a heavier and more acidic load through drainage than a kitchen does, and floor drainage in a converted warehouse is frequently the weak point. We look at the whole run rather than the fixture that happens to be backing up.
Yes, and we scope it that way from the start. Neat routing, proper fixing and paint to match where appropriate. It costs a little more time and it is the difference between a repair that reads as deliberate and one that reads as a patch.
Yes, and on a Wynwood conversion that is normally how it goes. We coordinate the slab work, the routing and the make-good with whoever else is on site, and our general maintenance crew can close up behind us so the patching does not land on somebody else.
Further reading
Also in Wynwood
One number for the whole scope, including the make-good after another trade has finished.
Other submarkets we have written up
Tell us the property and the problem, and we will come back with a window.
