Kitchen advice from people who have worked in kitchens.

Greasebags covers the kitchen from three directions: tools and equipment, decor and DIY, and cleaning.

The reason all three live in the same place is that they are connected in ways most kitchen writing ignores.

A decor decision carries maintenance implications. A tool recommendation depends on how the kitchen actually gets used. A cleaning protocol only works when it accounts for the specific surface you are dealing with.

Founded By Deirdre Malloy

The site was started by Deirdre Malloy, an independent kitchen designer who has been working on renovation projects in Chicago since 2012. She kept noticing the same gap after every project finished. Clients would have their kitchen handed over and immediately run into questions nobody had prepared them for:

• What to stock it with,

• How to keep it in good condition,

• What to change about the way it looked without spending another ten thousand dollars?

There was no single place she could send them that handled all three honestly. Greasebags is the attempt to build that place.

Deirdre found the first piece of the team at KBIS, the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show held annually in Las Vegas.

Renata & Marcus

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It is the main trade event for kitchen and bath design professionals, and he and Renata happened to end up at the same lunch after a session they had both found underwhelming.

Renata was there as a kitchenware writer and product consultant. The conversation at lunch turned into an argument about whether most kitchen tool coverage actually served the people reading it or mainly served the brands behind the products.

They disagreed about the exact cause, exchanged contacts, and stayed in touch because the disagreement was worth continuing.

The person who brought Marcus Webb into the picture was Renata. She had come across a piece he had written about how he contracted a gastrointestinal infection from his own kitchen in 2013, traced to a cutting board he had been cleaning incorrectly for twelve years.

The piece was a complete audit of every cleaning practice in his home, methodology included, published in full. Renata sent Deirdre the link when the question of post-renovation surface care came up in one of their email exchanges.

The Talk That Bought Greasebags to Life

The three of them met in person the following May at the NRA Show, the National Restaurant Association Show held every year at McCormick Place in Chicago. The dinner that closed the second day of the show was where the conversation happened.

Marcus had spent part of the afternoon walking the show floor, doing what he tends to do at these events: checking cleaning product claims against EPA registration data and finding the label language and the actual registration describing two different things.

Renata said the same gap existed on the equipment side, specification language that read as technical information but had been written by a marketing team. Deirdre said her renovation clients received both problems at once, and she had been trying to find somewhere that addressed all of it together for three years.

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These things lived in three separate publications. Nobody has put them in the same room. Well, WE DID!

That was the conversation, and that’s how this site came into existence.

The recommendations for this place come from people who worked in their fields for years before writing about them.