Fire-Belching Forges Are Taking Over Top Restaurant Kitchens
Massive handmade, wood-fired grills from Grillworks are changing how renowned chefs cook everything from beef to beets.
A Grillworks grill installed at Lilia in Brooklyn.
Photographer: Cole Wilson for Bloomberg Businessweek
One of the brightest stars in the constellation of fine dining is an idyllic farm just north of New York City. The kitchen monks running Blue Hill at Stone Barns have been known to juice milkweed, pickle ferns, or smoke tomato water.
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.