BBQ restaurant owner-operator late-night red-line early warning - before the business ever fails, noise complaints, patio creep, gas and charcoal, and expiring licenses arrive first

You are a risk screener for a street-front BBQ restaurant; I am the owner. BBQ shops rarely go under from slow business - they go under from late-night red lines nobody watches: neighbor complaints accumulating into enforcement, patio tables creeping past the line, an aging gas hose, expired licenses. I will answer the signal list below item by item with the shop's real situation. Where I don't know, I will write "don't know" - do not smooth it over for me. Grade by the rules and tell me what must be handled this week.

Signal list I answer item by item:
- Neighbors and enforcement: verbal warnings from neighbors or building management in the last 30 days? Any complaint notice forwarded from a city hotline? Any inspector visit in the last six months?
- Outdoor seating: is the current table footprint bigger or smaller than at opening? Does it touch a curb ramp, the main sidewalk path, or a fire lane? What time does the last table clear?
- Fire and gas: when was the gas hose last replaced? How is spent charcoal disposed of the same night (ever dumped at the door or in the green belt)? Is the extinguisher gauge needle in the green or the red, and when does the certification expire? Who shuts gas and power at close, and is there a record?
- Licenses and people: when do the business license and the food service permit expire? How many staff health certificates expire within 30 days? How many people are on the floor at the thinnest late-night hour?
- Order: how many drunken-guest incidents (guest vs. guest, guest vs. staff) in the last 90 days? Any that reached the police?

Grading rules (higher tier wins):
- Red (handle this week): either license already expired or expiring within 30 days with renewal not started; extinguisher failed or expired; hose replacement date unknown while fire is in daily use; a correction order or formal complaint case already received; seating blocking a fire lane or the main sidewalk
- Yellow (handle this month): verbal warnings totaling 2+; the patio running slightly past its usual footprint every night; health certificates expiring in 30-90 days; 2+ incidents in 90 days; no fixed person performing the close-down gas and power shutoff
- Grey (build the log first, grade later): every "don't know" - not knowing is itself the risk; start recording, re-run next month

Output format:
- One table: item / my answer / tier / the action (one sentence, with a concrete object) / deadline
- Red items first, each followed by one line on why it outranks the others, ordered life safety > enforcement risk > complaint accumulation
- Close with a logbook suggestion of no more than 5 columns: which signals to record monthly, who records, where it lives

Constraints:
- Cite no specific statute or regulation numbers, quote no fine amounts - enforcement norms differ by city, and an invented citation is worse than none
- No "raise safety awareness" or "conduct a comprehensive review" - actions without an object are not actions
- On "don't know" items, do not guess an answer for me or default them to safe
- No pleasantries; start directly with the grading table

Why it is written this way

Every item in the signal list is something the owner can answer from memory: how many times the neighbor complained, which zone the extinguisher needle sits in, whose health certificate is nearly up. The fatal flaw of early-warning tools is not analytical power but input cost - demand three months of logs before the first run and the first run never happens. So no question in the list requires checking a system; the owner's head is the database. Get it running first; the logbook is the last output, not a prerequisite.

The grading priority (life safety > enforcement risk > complaint accumulation) is fixed deliberately, because a model's default is to rank by how official something sounds - it will put an expiring license above the gas hose because "expired" reads as more formal. An owner's calendar runs on "which thing blows up if I skip it today": complaints are a slow variable that takes months to compound; the hose is a fast variable that goes from fine to catastrophic in one night. The warning earns its keep by getting that order right, not by listing every risk.

The grey tier - "not knowing is itself the risk" - exists to block two model habits: smoothing over the user's gaps ("cannot recall the hose replacement date" softened into "schedule an inspection soon") and treating missing information as low risk. In reality, not knowing when the hose was replaced means there is no replacement regime at all; the correct output is "build the log, re-run next month," not a reassuring guess.

Banning statute numbers and fine amounts targets the model's most confident fabrication surface. Occupancy, noise, and outdoor-seating rules vary enormously between jurisdictions; an invented "per section XX, fine XXX" looks professional and collapses on the first check, dragging the credibility of the whole warning down with it. This tool's value is grading and ordering, not legal citation - writing that boundary into the constraints keeps the effort where it pays.

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