Grilling will never go out of fashion. As long as there are summers and sausages, Americans will step up. But until recently, grilling over a live fire has been more of a casual activity, fit for the backyard and for more approachable restaurants like the Korean barbecue staple, San Soo Gab San, and classic barbecue joints like Lems Bar-B-Q. Expensive restaurants were more likely to use meticulous, carefully controlled devices, like immersion circulators and anti-griddles.
That’s all changed in the past few years, as a host of new fine-dining restaurants have embraced fire as the workhorse of their kitchens. Instead of deliveries of liquid nitrogen, these restaurants receive stacks of hardwood. Turning on a switch has been replaced by tending a roaring fire.
Lena Brava
No restaurant has embraced the live fire quite as completely as Lena Brava. With no gas ovens or burners, absolutely all of the cooking at Rick Bayless’ new West Loop restaurant happens on either the wood-fired grill or in the wood-fired oven.
Some dishes initially presented problems (how do you reduce a sauce or cook an egg over a fire?), but the chefs, Lisa and Fred Despres, did extensive research to find the best solutions. “Once you start grilling things with wood, you never go back,” says Lisa Despres. “The wood-burning grill gives everything a slight smoky quality. Maybe you don’t even notice it at first, but it’s there.”
Certainly, guests at Lena Brava notice the massive grill when they walk in. “Bayless always says that people are drawn to fire,” says Despres. “It feels inviting, and you can see the passion in the kitchen.” Though she likes the upstairs dining room at the restaurant, “downstairs you can really feel the energy of the room.”
Lena Brava’s fire is built primarily with oak, though there is also a minimal amount of hickory, apple and cherry. “We get all of the wood from 20 farmers in Michigan, Indiana and Illinois,” says Despres. “The wood is salvaged from dead trees, so, environmentally, it’s the best it can be.”
Though you’d think chefs used to regular kitchen equipment would long for the chance to flip a switch on an oven, Despres fully embraced the new setup. “We don’t even miss the stove,” says Despres. “Everything is primal and feels so right.”
900 W. Randolph St., 312-733-1975, www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/lena-brava
Roister
Andrew Brochu and Grant Achatz debated constantly before opening Roister about whether or not to have a wood-fired grill. “We kept coming back to it,” says chef Brochu. “Grilling is not new, but it was new to us, and that was exciting.”
Instead of limiting what the kitchen could do, the grill allows the chefs to experiment in a way they didn’t imagine. “You find yourself asking, ‘What if we do this?'” says Brochu. “You can’t do that with a fryer or a burner.”
That often means finding ways of cooking beyond tossing ingredients on a grill grate. To cook the 2-pound porterhouse steak, for example, the chefs bury the meat among the coals. It’s about as far from using a sous-vide machine as possible. “Because it’s buried, you can’t touch it and you can’t see it,” says Brochu. “You’re cooking blind.”
To get it right, Brochu had to go through a lot of trial and error, though not as much as he first thought. “Confidence is very important,” says Brochu. “I had to trust that it would come out right.”
During service, about half of the dishes are cooked in the wood-fired hearth, though grilled components show up in roughly 75 percent of the dishes. The kitchen mainly relies on oak wood, though the chefs occasionally will add some apple wood. “We’ve messed with things like lemon grass,” says Brochu, “but that’s definitely not on the menu yet.”
Brochu plans to experiment constantly. He’s dried green garlic for grinding into a garlic powder. He’s also grilled ingredients and then sent them off to Pipeworks Brewing to use in Roister’s own beer. “I’m constantly questioning everything we cook.”
951 W. Fulton Market, www.roisterrestaurant.com
Maple & Ash
When executive chef Danny Grant decided to rethink the particulars of the traditional steakhouse, a hardwood-fired grill was a key component. Almost all of the proteins at Maple & Ash are cooked over the grill. “It just makes our food taste better,” says Grant.
The restaurant uses a mix of, you guessed it, maple and ash wood, along with oak and some apple and pear wood. All the wood comes from local farmers and turned out not to be hard to get. “Most of the time, the wood is just laying around their farm,” says Grant. “They don’t want it, and we do.”
To help increase the smoky flavor of the steaks, and to simply make them taste better, they’re basted with a beef butter when almost done. “The butter helps catch some of the smoke,” says Grant. Made from butter, garlic, thyme, beef stock and reduced red wine, the beef butter also acts as a kind of immediate pan sauce, which would normally be impossible when using a grill.
8 W. Maple St., 312-944-8888, www.mapleandash.com
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