I saw Baz over the lid of my grill. Flames flickered high as I quickly waved a red plastic, Chinese-made fan across the coals, white ash flying up around me, the sound of the flames wooshing ever hotter filling the space. He and his friend Pari had been foraging in my backyard, picking over what the Eurasian Jays and Great Tits had flicked out of the food bowls I spread across the yard. Two pigeons — one a cinnamon gray, the other the more familiar gray with a green iridescence — were waiting for the others to leave before swooping down for their own feast. Periodic violations meant periodic fights. As the lid came down with a clank, they scattered.
These small bits of avian theater have always been part of what makes grilling fun for me. A way of being out in nature, among other things, while doing something I enjoy. I’m sure there’s something about primitive psychology there. Whatever it is, I’m happy to embrace it.
The charcoal I used was purchased on Allegro, a Polish shopping app much like Amazon. A few kilos worth came in a hulking paper bag, and I emptied the chunks into a plastic bin I keep on the back porch. There were a few chunks of dried wood for flavoring. Then the ritual before the ritual: shut the lid to let the heat rise, clean the grates with a Grill Rescue brush made of fire-resistant fabric, no metal spikes that could end up in the food. And, finally, oiling them down with a cut onion and a long-handled fork, keeping my hands clear of the inevitable flare-up.
This is what I like about charcoal over gas. The DIY nature of it. More art than science. An active participation in preparing a meal. I recognize a gas grill would be more time-efficient. I also recognize that a propane canister sitting on my back porch makes me nervous in a way charcoal never has.
I’d like to think the pull toward all of this—the fire, the smoke, the small, primitive satisfaction of getting the temperature just right—comes from somewhere old. My Persian background carries a loose affiliation with a long history of fire worship, the Zoroasters and their eternal flames. Some lifelong obsession with better understanding my roots. This idea that if I can just keep a fire going properly, I’ll have somehow pleased my ancestors.
It’s a nice story. But I don’t think it’s the main driving force.
Some of my earliest memories are of watching my dad grill. And it wasn’t a summer thing, the way it was for most of my friends. He did it year-round—like the postal service, rain or shine, sleet or snow. I can still see him out there. The grill was parked on the concrete slab where a few hours earlier we’d been playing pickup basketball or soccer. He, in his coveralls, a neon-orange deer-hunting beanie on his head—the kind he wore hiking out at the monastery a half-hour south of town, a signal to nearby hunters that he wasn’t a deer. The flames flickered high, catching his tawny skin. Intensity in his eyes as he flipped the chops or steaks. Me watching from a window or venturing out into the cold every so often to bring him something, or just to check on his progress.
That’s the fire I’m actually chasing.
My vision of grilling as art rather than science means every session is different—new observations, new small lessons. Now that we live somewhere I can grill regularly, I take advantage of it. When we were in DC and Beijing, I was resigned to a handful of times a year—back visiting my parents in Kentucky, at my in-laws’ in Pennsylvania, or at a friend’s place outside the Beijing city center. In the last year or so, I’ve grilled almost every week.
In Beijing, I envied anyone with a backyard, however far from the city that backyard happened to be. In the US, I’d plot meals around visits home—timing a trip to the butcher in my hometown, or scouting the closest one to my in-laws. Each visit felt like a relief. A perpetual itch, finally scratched.
There have been mistakes, admittedly. Assuming my grill was big enough for a small spatchcocked turkey. Or a pound each of wings, breasts, and thighs. Once, having not let the olive oil fully drip off some lamb chops before setting them down, I glanced through the back window and caught flames reaching out from under a closed lid. I pulled the top open, braced for a backdraft, moved the meat off, let the grease burn itself out, then put the chops back on the hot grates and did my best to finesse the whole thing into something palatable. For someone who prides himself on precision, on considering every angle, each mishap is a small shot to the ego.
That’s all okay, though. Because, like an avid golfer, I’ve come to see mistakes as part of the game—less a battle with the current session than an attempt to avoid repeating the mistakes of the last one. Which, of course, only makes room for a new set of mistakes, because every session has its own dynamics.
If I’m being honest with myself, the ancient past explanation was always the more flattering one to tell. The truer version is smaller and more recent: this is nostalgia. It’s the same instinct that’s had me picking up bird-watching lately—a way of reaching back not to some distant ancestral fire but to a much more specific one, on a concrete slab, thirty years ago. Grilling was simply part of growing up. In the last few years before I moved to DC, I was back at my mom’s place, grilling several times a week on the old square Walmart grill with the peeling blue paint on the bottom pan—because really, no matter how many bells and whistles you have, a grill master can make do with anything. Pulled by the heat. By the smell of charcoal and lighter fluid. By the sizzle of meat cooking to perfection. Its own siren song.
Now, as an expat with space to grill for the first time in over a decade, I’m taking full advantage—just as I jump at every chance to travel while we’re here. And when I’m out there, fan in hand, waving smoke off the coals, I catch myself doing the thing my dad used to do without knowing he was doing it: making a private ritual out of something everyone else treats as a weekend chore.
(This is the point at which I would add pics of my kids, but because people are weird and because the last time I shared photos of them publicly, we got a death threat from Iranian Monarchists that targeted both my daughter and me (almost three years old at the time), because they thought I wasn’t anti-regime enough, I won’t share those photos.)
I have two kids, four and six, who’d currently rather watch Stillwater or race Matchbox cars down a track built over the stairs. My brother, four years older than me, was the one who got looped in first—ferrying marinated meat out to my dad, eventually manning the grill himself. I spent those years watching instead. Someday I’ll hand one of my kids the tongs the way my dad eventually handed them to my brother—not because the fire needs pleasing, and not because some Zoroastrian ancestor is keeping score. But because this is something my dad gave me, and something I want to give them. A thread that binds my past to whatever future they’re headed toward.
Until then, it’s still just me waving my fan, keeping half an eye on the grates, half an eye on Baz and Pari, who’ve already circled back to peck around what the others have left behind.
If you’ve got a ritual you inherited without quite realizing it (cooking, running, something smaller), I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
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