The assignment
A hood fire in a commercial kitchen left the cook line, walk-in refrigeration and back-of-house standing but smoke-saturated. The operator’s own list ran to a few dozen lines. US Claims Solutions was engaged to produce a full contents inventory.
What made it difficult
Nobody counts a dish pit from memory. Restaurant losses are consistently under-measured not on the large equipment, which is memorable, but on the categories held in quantity: sheet pans, hotel pans, china, glassware, flatware, smallwares, linen and stores. Those categories can reach a five-figure sum on their own and appear on almost no self-prepared list.
What was recorded
Cook line, hood system, refrigeration, ice machines, mixers and dishwashing equipment by manufacturer, model and serial number with nameplates photographed. Walk-in contents itemized by product and quantity. Bar stock counted by bottle. Front-of-house furniture, fittings and point-of-sale hardware. And the back-of-house categories, counted rather than estimated.
Outcome
The final inventory ran to roughly ten times the number of lines on the original list — not because the operator had understated the loss, but because “kitchen equipment, assorted” is not a line that can be valued. Equipment was priced against current equivalents where original models were discontinued, which on commercial kitchen equipment is most of them.