Hot Water Baseboard Heat in Kitchen behind Cabinet & Appliances?

[Kamyar Dastani]

We're in the process of rehabbing one of the units we manage, and during teardown of the kitchen, we notice that on the wall behind where the sink and dishwasher were, was a hot water baseboard heater. We consulted with a couple HVAC guys and while they did advise that it wouldn't be too much of an issue because it's just "radiant heat", I wanted to see if anyone has seen something similar or encountered a situation like this? 

What we'd like to avoid is drilling into the slab and dropping the hot water pipe under the floor, or re-working the plumbing and electric to change the kitchen layout to avoid anything on that wall. Our contractor is suggesting we leave a small gap of ~3" from the wall to where our cabinets and appliances would come, but our concern is that this would lead to food/water falling through the large crack and being hard to retrieve/clean.