Fireside Chat- Summer 2023
You’re heading to France for a rugby match; you ask an English mate in Toulouse for a restaurant recommendation, without specifying food preference – be it classic French cuisine, Italian, or Asian.
The suggestion without hesitation? Barbaque. Proof positive that the love of barbecue touches every country, crosses every continent, embraces every culture.
The result? The most sublime cote de boeuf. It was to share between three of us; we could have fed the entire Toulouse rugby squad.
We nearly did. The following day we headed to watch Toulouse play the Bulls from South Africa in the Champions Cup and had been tempted, after the second bottle of red with my rugby confreres from South Africa, Julian and Alastair Constance, to ask for a doggy bag to wrap the remaining pieces soaked in chimichurri sauce.
The Barbaque Carmes restaurant (pictured) recommendation came from England rugby player Jack Willis. After the match, did we talk rugby and Jack’s command of the breakdown and tackle count? Did we heck.
It was about the England flanker’s love of the Kamado Joe brand, how he liked the look of the new Konnected Joe grill and what he’d been cooking low and slow on his Traeger in La Ville Rose beside the Garonne river.
South Africans, of course, love a BBQ, sorry braai, and with South Africa World Cup winning coach Jake White and Springboks World Cup winning hooker Bismarck du Plessis in the Toulouse bar with the Bulls team from Pretoria after the match, I could have sold several subscriptions to BBQ magazine.
Food bringing people together is a cliché for a reason. You can pitch up anywhere in the world, as a stranger in a strange land, and find friends for life over a meal, or simply a casual culinary conversation triggering instant camaraderie.
BBQ is next level food chat. I’ve never had a proud cook show me the Instagram feed of their indoor oven and a chicken roasting behind the steamed glass of a monochrome kitchen appliance.
Mention fire cooking and al fresco dining and you’ll get the rubble and digger images at the start of the garden project, right through to the completion of the dream outdoor kitchen or BBQ shack, camera hovering over the grills, flames licking the meat or heat charring the veggies.
‘I thought you were going to show me pictures of your new baby?’
‘That is my new baby!’
A week after Toulouse I was closer to home, in Brighton, Sussex, to check out Embers, a new wood-fired restaurant from Dave Marrow and Isaac Bartlett-Copeland – primal fire cage and grills with all the dishes cooked over locally sourced kiln-dried ash and birch wood.
The menu is small plates, be it charred broccoli with sweetcorn and jalapeno cream, scorched sea bream, or creamy ‘bonfire’ potato with black garlic – and large ones, such as pork tomahawk with burnt leeks, miso celeriac with koji-soaked king oyster mushrooms, or hake with chaat spiced vadouvan mussels.
Work your way through the house cocktails too, including Embers Own, a bonfire of cognac, rye and smoke, and El Fuego, rum, pineapple and vanilla. Next time, I’m bringing the Toulouse rugby team.
Fire, food and friendship wherever you are in the world.
À votre santé.
Yours in live-fire cooking
Rupert Bates
Editor