These Fire-Belching Forges Are Taking Over Top Restaurant Kitchens

Lately, however, they’ve shifted their scientific approach to something more prehistoric. These days, the Blue Hill team grills pretty much everything over an open fire. The shift wasn’t planned, or even expected, says executive chef and co-owner Dan Barber. It was largely catalyzed by equipment the restaurant bought from a company called Grillworks, specifically an 8-foot-long open-hearth contraption that looks like a medieval torture rack.

The grill has essentially taken a static endeavor—controlling the heat of a burner—and added three more dimensions: distance, smoke, and the subtle nuances of burning different kinds of wood. “The more variables you can control, the less anxious a chef becomes,” Barber explains. “This grill gives you a kind of uber control, which I’d never experienced before.”

It was, in short, a major upgrade from the little Weber the restaurant had been using. On any given day, the Blue Hill crew will be charring greens, caramelizing fruit, searing beef, and slow-roasting lamb. Beets get buried directly in the coals. “This fall, we’ll roast corn over burning corn cobs,” Barber says. “It’s weird, man.”

Open-fire cooking has been taking the food world by storm, boosted by the rise of chef celebrities such as Francis Mallmann, who’ve made a fashion of adding a touch of theater to cooking. It turns out, if one wants to honor preciously grown local ingredients by not changing their flavors too much, burning wood is a good way to do it. “It just hit this zeitgeist,” says food writer Adam Sachs, former editor-in-chief of Saveur. “There’s a reason this kind of cooking resonates with so many chefs. It’s very elemental, very direct, and honest.”

Although there are several companies making food forges, Grillworks is cornering the budding market. Walk into some of the most on-point restaurants in the world, and you’ll likely find a Grillworks apparatus front and center in all its shiny, steampunk glory: Lilia in Brooklyn, N.Y.; Marble in Johannesburg; Bopp & Tone in Sydney; the Weslodge Saloon in Dubai; the Hotel Schweizerhof in Zermatt, Switzerland. In Toronto, Neruda opened in November on the shore of Lake Ontario with what it calls the world’s largest open-fire grill: a Grillworks Infierno 240, as in 240 inches long, or 20 feet. On a busy night, as many as seven cooks hustle around the 7,000-pound cauldron like tattooed imps, raking the fires and covering the surface with octopus, greens, and dry-aged tomahawk steaks.

This year, Grillworks will sell about 350 grills, at prices ranging from $4,000 to $200,000. Half of those units will go to commercial kitchens; only a few years ago, most went to homes. Chef Missy Robbins had one installed when she opened Lilia, her Italian restaurant in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. “It was the first piece of equipment I knew I wanted,” she says. The grill is very simple but “allows for very special cooking.”

The rig, though hectic and massive, has an aesthetic appeal that comes from a bit of clever engineering. The V-shaped rods are slightly inclined so they can funnel dripping juices down into basting pans at the chef’s waist. The wheels that raise and lower the grill are linked to a cog that gives a satisfying “clack” at each step. Almost every part of the apparatus, including the fire bricks bordering the hearth, can be removed for easy cleaning or replacement.

Looking at the thing incites a common refrain: Why didn’t I think of that? You probably could have. Grillworks is the brainchild of Charles Eisendrath, a compulsive tinkerer and wordsmith. In 1974 he ended a globe-trotting career as a Time correspondent in Buenos Aires and, with his wife and two sons in tow, decamped to teach at the University of Michigan. But he missed the afternoon-long Argentine meals made on a parrilla—a hearth, usually homemade, with a grill that can be raised and lowered.

He soon enlisted some of Michigan’s famously skilled metalsmiths to turn his notebook doodlings into a breathing, burning grill. He arrived at a version he liked in 1978 and began casually selling a few, mostly to friends who came over for dinner. In 1984, Eisendrath locked up a patent and began gaining traction in the food world thanks to a lunch invite from James Beard, the famous cook and author. The Eisendraths flew to the Beard estate with a grill, enjoyed a long meal, and were told that the grill would be staying.

But Eisendrath wasn’t interested in leaving academia; Grillworks would be a hobby, a side gig for lazy summer afternoons. “He called it recreational capitalism,” says Ben Eisendrath, his son. “He always said he’d only want to run it out of his left bottom desk drawer, and that’s what he did.”

Eventually, the metalworkers started retiring, and Grillworks cranked to a stop in the late-1990s, right around the time the younger Eisendrath began working at AOL in Washington, D.C. A decade later the tech giant was foundering, and he took a buyout. He was 37 and single and had spent half a career cobbling together esoteric revenue streams for a blundering empire of email. A steel box of fire suddenly looked pretty good.

“I thought, What’s the downside?” Eisendrath says. Grillworks was reborn in 2007 with a notebook full of old designs and a waitlist of 20 orders. He gravitated to commercial kitchens, acting as a sort of one-man R&D department, studying how chefs used his product. The grills became slightly more nuanced, more carefully branded, and quite a bit bigger. “I told my guys, ‘This is a warship. This is Jules Verne,’ ” he says.

When a restaurant is running at full steam, the entire back of a Grillworks unit is a wall of rippling fire. Wood burns down into orange embers, which fall through metal grates and get shoveled forward under the grill by attentive chefs with pink-flushed faces. Smudged with soot and clad in leather aprons, they could pass for brakemen on a 19th century train.

Sachs, the food writer, had a Grillworks installed in (yes, inside) his Brooklyn home, an expense he calls an “absurd luxury.” Nevertheless, he uses it habitually, sometimes bumming wood from the local pizza joint in a pinch. He turns baby pigs on a spit, roasts eggplant and garlic and mashes it up into a “baba ghanouj-type thing,” and grills slabs of salmon on top of a thick bed of dill. “I have a lovely French oven on the other side of the room, and it’s kind of like an unloved child,” he says.

The enterprise is profitable but not as thickly as one might expect. Each grill takes at least 20 hours to build, work that’s split among 25 or so welders in rural Michigan. Eisendrath, who’s still based in Washington, has put a premium on customer service and has a full-time “grill doctor” on staff in New York, ready to fly to one of the installed machines. Even so, he usually manages 50% revenue growth each year. “Sales are mostly inbound these days,” he says. “The restaurants turn into our showrooms.”

Bill Langelier, a real estate investor in San Francisco who ordered his first Grillworks in 1983, recently bought his third, a 54-inch model for about $20,000. Dispatched at various properties, they’re all getting regular use. “They are the gold standard,” he says.

At his Napa Valley home, Langelier, 75, cooks over olive branches. “I’m sure that these grills are going to be around a lot longer than I will.” First, though, he’ll have the unit in his Pacific Heights backyard reinforced with steel plates in the event of an earthquake. Then he’ll put on some oysters.

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.