Wish They All could Be East Coast Grills

Just beyond the merry-go-round, in one of the many grassy picnic sections of Griffith Park--home each weekend to a hundred kids’ birthday parties--stands a man and his fire.

Over by the ice cooler, several toddlers beat up on a grinning green dinosaur pin~ata, but the griller, Chris Schlesinger, chef of Boston’s East Coast Grill and co-author of five cookbooks, including James Beard Award-winner “The Thrill of the Grill” (Morrow, 1990), calmly watches the fire for the perfect moment to begin cooking his specialty of the day, hot dogs for a bunch of 2- and 3-year-olds. It’s a heck of a way to promote a book.

Schlesinger, tan, with short-cropped blond hair, standing casual in a pair of flip-flops he grabbed out of his suitcase not long after getting off a plane an hour before, looks in need of a beer. He settles for a Diet Coke.

This chef doesn’t prod or poke at the fire in the style of so many anxious home grillers hoping to impress the fire into submission with their deft handling of a pair of tongs. He does, however, build what he calls a two-level fire, pushing the wood charcoal to one side of the kettle drum so that when the moment is right, he will have several surfaces on which to grill his hot dogs--hot, medium and low.

“Hey, bud, how’re you doin’?” Schlesinger asks a 2-year-old named Devin. “Would you like a dog?”

Devin, who is going through an intense Emeril phase via daily viewings of the Food Network, looks up at the chef with awe, then smiles at his dad. Yes, he’ll have a hot dog, and by the way, he seems to signal to his dad, this guy is cool.

With hot dogs making the rounds, Schlesinger, who is the nephew of Harvard historian and Kennedy speech writer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as well as the grandson of social historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. and feminist Elizabeth Schlesinger, gets down to the slightly more serious grilling of an Alaskan halibut fillet.

Schlesinger has two halibut recipes in his newest book, “License to Grill” (Morrow, $27.50), written with his longtime co-author, John Willoughby. But without a kitchen at his disposal and having just endured a cross-country flight, the chef resorts to an easy but dependable solution. He takes out a canister of his own Inner Beauty spice rub--his Inner Beauty habanero hot sauces are famous among chile-heads--smooths it all over the fish and throws the fillet on the grill. No ceremony about it.

“Do you recommend using one of those special grates for fish?” Devin’s dad asks.

“Nah,” Schlesinger says. “I just do it right on the grill. I figure if you do it right, you don’t need that all that.”

“How do you make sure it doesn’t fall through?”

“Start with a really hot, lightly oiled grill, a clean grill,” Schlesinger advises. Some people like to talk sports, Schlesinger loves to talk grilling. “Then when you put down the fish, don’t move it around a lot. Some people start moving the fish right away and say, ‘It’s sticking.’ Let it sit for a while so it’ll get a skin on it and you can flip it.”

“I didn’t know that,” Devin’s dad says. “I’ll try it.”

Schlesinger seems satisfied, happy that there might be one less anxious griller in the world.

Q&A;

Question: You surf. You’re tan. You’ve written cookbooks on grilling, on salsa, even on salad--in other words, California food. What are you doing living and cooking in Boston?

Answer: It’s where all my friends are, and, I think, at the heart of it, I’m an East Coast guy.

Q: Yet you’re attracted to foods that at least on the surface don’t seem like East Coast food.

A: Well, part of it is that I grew up on the beach. I’m a beach bum guy. The ocean was the backyard at our house, so I grew up surfing. That was in Virginia Beach. Then I lived in Florida, Hawaii, places where I could get close to the waves.

In fact, I had my first serious brush with ethnic food when I was 20 and living in Barbados for the winter. We were living in a small town on the north coast, and we ran out of money, so we just started eating what everybody else ate, which was a ton of seafood and a ton of chiles. I got turned on to the Scotch bonnet pepper down there, and I got turned on to rum too. I think once you start eating spicy food, you don’t really stop, so when I came back I was psyched about hot food.

The type of food I like is Chinese food, Thai food, Salvadoran food. When I started cooking at the restaurant, I tried to put together an understanding of why I liked all these seemingly disparate cuisines. I realized that most of the flavors I’m drawn to come from warm-weather places. I think the closer a place is to the equator, the more flavorful food gets. Plus the culture of eating is less formal than the culture of European eating, and I think that appealed to me.

Q: You say in your new book that your father was a classic dad griller. Tell me how he influenced your cooking.

A: He was a steak guy. Or rather a steak and lamb chop kind of guy. Sometimes hamburger. Pretty straightforward; he wasn’t a gourmet or anything. But he would drive an hour out of the way to get a good barbecued sandwich. When we grilled, it was really a father-son bonding thing, dealing with the fire, the prehistoric. I think his influence was about the joy of cooking, the excitement of it. Every time, he’d say, “This is the best dinner yet!” I think that he taught me about the fellowship of dinner, the sharing and the pleasure of coming to the table.

Q: A lot of people don’t have that.

A: Right. They get caught up in breaking a meal down into individual elements and separating those elements from the simple pleasure of eating. I think that’s when eating becomes elitist. It seems to me that for food to be a real joy, it has to be accessible to everybody.

Q: That message comes across in your book. It’s clear that you want people to have fun with the recipes.

A: Well, I think as a culture we suffer from the French domination of our culinary outlook. As if there’s some morality to cooking, that’s it’s right or wrong. You just see so many people whose pride and joy is interrupted with worry.

I had a friend who loved to cook, who loved to be around food and loved to go shopping, but when she started to cook, she was so self-conscious about it; she couldn’t let herself go. She’d constantly say, “Is it all right?” or “I screwed it up, right?”

And I think that’s the way a lot of us grew up, with this specter of what “great food” was. The notion of right and wrong and good and bad. So as a cook, in my books and in my restaurants too, I’m just trying to break that stuff down. Food doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t have to be hard to make. Things can be simple and easy and fun. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.

Q: You studied cooking at a big-deal place, the Culinary Institute of America. What was that like?

A: It was classic pretentious French stuff. We were just reproducing the recipes that came before us. There was no creativity to it at all. Plus, I was 18. I was learning about drinking beer.

I’d dropped out of college--I wanted to be an oceanographer so I could be near the ocean, the way I figured it, but I couldn’t handle the chemistry--so my dad encouraged me to go to culinary school. It wasn’t a prestigious thing then; I mean, my dad’s friends felt bad for me. They’d say things like, “Oh, Chris, he’s a nice kid, but he’s going to voc-tech.” I was just a cook. I could have been a plumber or an electrician.

Of course, then everything changed. When I first started cooking in restaurants, I was surrounded by grizzled trades guys. All men. You had to cook the duck a l’orange and the veal Oscar. You couldn’t bring any of your own creativity to it.

But nouvelle cuisine came along and created this open environment so that people felt comfortable trying different things. It made room for guys like me and started turning Americans on to food. I would say that this is maybe the best time in the history of the world to be in this profession. I mean, out of the most well-known chefs of all time, 95% are living and practicing today. It’s awesome.

Q: If cooking school didn’t inspire you, when did you get serious about cooking?

A: It was a slow evolution. The cook who had the biggest influence on me was Jimmy Burke. I worked with him at the Harvest, which was this cutting-edge restaurant in Boston. It was the early ‘80s and Jimmy was something like 22 and the rest of us were 19. He would encourage everyone to do different flavors, but he’d emphasize simplicity. And he’d talk about work and professionalism.

His talent is taking a couple of common ingredients, putting them together and having them taste more than the sum of their parts. The guy who replaced him is Bob Kincaid, who promoted me and supported me.

I actually quit the Harvest and went to Hawaii because I wanted to go surfing again. I ended up working in hotels and just moving around. But working in a Hawaii hotel, after being introduced to real cooking at the Harvest, I decided: I’m not working in anymore rinky-dink restaurants with people who aren’t serious. I like food enough, I respect it, I’m kind of into it.

Q: So food was becoming more important to you than surfing?

A: Exactly. That’s when I started to make decisions on where to move based on where I could get a good job instead of where the temperature was in the 80s and there were overhead waves.

I was very fortunate because all I really did in my 20s was travel, hang out and go surfing. I only worked to earn money to go surfing. All my other buddies were going to college and working hard, but then I turn 30 and I get this restaurant. I was able to parlay a misspent youth into something real. All that time I spent goofing off became experience that I used to cook.

Q: And in your goofing-off phase, you went to a lot of barbecues.

A: Sure did.

Q: In “License to Grill” you make a point of distinguishing between grilling and barbecuing. Most people don’t think about the difference.

A: I think it’s an important distinction. Grilling is not barbecuing. I think of barbecue--slowly cooking one of the tougher cuts of meat over the smoky, indirect heat of a low fire--as a neat cultural folkway. The Hawaiians have the luau, Mexico has its pibils, and there’s no place else in the world that barbecues meat the way we do in the United States.

Grilling is a classic culinary technique that’s defined in Escoffier along with sauteing and braising and all that. It’s one of the fundamental tenets of cooking. It’s quick, high-heat cooking over a hot fire.

Q: One of the techniques you describe in the book is building a two-level fire. Explain what you mean.

A: A lot of people fill up the barbecue with charcoal and have one big fire. What I try to do instead is have graduated parts of the fire. I think the characteristic flavor of grilling is almost solely the high heat. So you need to have one place that’s really wicked hot. To all my cooks at the restaurant I say that the first thing they need to do is get the meat brown. The fire’s got to be hot enough so the meat’s not totally cooked through before it’s seared.

Then you need a place to bring it down so you can do the sear and move depending on the thickness of the meat. You sear the meat, then you move to a cooler part of the grill to cook through.

Q: You’re not a fan of wood chips.

A: Flavor comes from high heat, not chips. Sometimes I’ll clip off a couple branches from an apple tree and put it on the fire to get a little smoke. But I think for the most part, people misunderstand where the flavor from grilling comes from. Most grilled meats don’t cook long enough to pick up the nuances of different kinds of wood chips.

Also, I’m trying to fight this thing about people trying to make grilling so complicated. You go to a hardware or cookware store and they’re all just covered with this junk. I can see my father, or the classic dad, looking up at the stuff and thinking he’s somehow missing something, that there’s all this stuff he doesn’t understand. But he’s not missing anything. I push the non-technology end of grilling. All you need is a grill, a fire, tongs, a metal brush and a beer.

Q: Then I suppose you’re not a fan of gas-fired grills.

A: John and I are grill guys, charcoal guys. Most of those gas grills are totally bogus. They don’t get as hot as charcoal-fueled fires. And if you don’t have the heat, you’re not really grilling.

My theory is that building the fire is the best part. There’s a little bit of tinkering, a little bit of guy stuff. If you don’t like this part, you’re probably going to go to a gas grill. I know some people find the fire to be too much trouble or too messy. But to me, if you take this part away, you might as well not grill at all.

Q: You and John did pose with an expensive gas grill in an ad, though.

A: Nice picture, huh? We told the company that we can’t be seen as endorsing gas. The way the ad was proposed, it was going to be seven different types of grills and five of them were wood-fired grills.

Q: In the book, you say to use the cover on a kettle grill only when cooking slow smoke-roasted meats over an indirect fire. You say you never use the cover for regular direct-heat grilling, not even for flare-ups. But a lot of backyard grillers cook with the covers on.

A: And I’ll bet their meat tastes like metallic, soggy smoke. The more I think about it, the more I can’t believe people use the cover when they’re cooking direct. I think that’s the grossest thing. I mean, it traps all that junk. It’s unbelievable.

It’s one thing to cover when you’re cooking indirect for longer periods of time--more than 45 minutes, say--so the smoke flavor might have a chance to overcome the top note of ashy cover flavor. Nobody else seems to be talking about this; I suppose it’s a direct attack on the barbecue industry. I keep looking over my shoulder to see if someone from Weber’s going to come walking in.

Q: What do you love most about grilling?

A: That it’s totally unpredictable. I even miss the days when lighter fluid was dangerous, when you had to be careful that the fluid wouldn’t come up into the can and explode.

I think it’s a challenging way to cook. And you have to be a cook. You can’t turn it on to 350 and turn on a timer. You have to be willing to deal with the vagaries of the fire and make some decisions on heat and make some decisions on timing and doneness and stuff like that. And when you come right down to it, that’s what cooking is.

THIN GRILLED PORK CHOPS WITH SIMPLE TOMATO RELISH (Chuletas)

Instead of fat, thick pork chops, Schlesinger favors the paper-thin chops--called chuletas in Spanish--that are eaten all over Latin America. “Most cooks,” Schlesinger writes in “License to Grill,” “rub these chops with a little garlic and lime, throw them on a super-hot grill and cook them fast. Chops as thin as you can find and a fire as hot as you can get it are the two keys to success with this method. The relish is a nice complement, but the chuletas are fantastic even without it.” Schlesinger’s choice of beverage with these chops: a cool margarita.

RELISH

2 large tomatoes, cored and cut into small dice

2 tablespoons cumin seeds, toasted if desired, or 1 tablespoon ground cumin

1 small red onion, peeled and cut into small dice

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon minced garlic

Salt

Freshly cracked black pepper

CHOPS

8 to 12 (4- to 5-ounce) thin-cut pork chops

Salt

Freshly cracked black pepper

2 tablespoons minced garlic

1 tablespoon minced fresh chile pepper of your choice

1/4 cup roughly chopped fresh oregano or cilantro

1/4 cup lime juice (about 2 limes)

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon achiote powder or paprika

RELISH Combine tomatoes, cumin, onion, vinegar, oil, garlic and salt and pepper to taste in small bowl. Toss well and set aside until ready to serve chops.

CHOPS

Sprinkle chops with salt and pepper to taste.

Make rub by combining garlic, chile, oregano, lime juice, olive oil and achiote powder in small bowl and mixing well.

Cover chops generously with rub.

Grill chops over hot fire about 3 minutes per side. To check for doneness, cut into 1 chop; there should be just a little pink showing inside. Pull chops off grill and serve with Relish.

4 servings. Each serving:

482 calories; 270 mg sodium; 86 mg cholesterol; 35 grams fat; 12 grams carbohydrates; 32 grams protein; 1.67 grams fiber.

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Grill Talk

Fuel: Schlesinger says charcoal briquettes are fine, but he prefers lump hardwood charcoal. “It’s made by the age-old process of burning hardwood in a closed container with very little oxygen. Because it’s almost pure carbon, it lights more easily, is more responsive to changes in oxygen level so you can regulate it more easily and burns cleaner and hotter than briquettes.” As for wood chips--”they’re just silly,” Schlesinger says.

Testing Doneness: The “peek and cheat” method is what Schlesinger favors. You just nick whatever you’re cooking and see if it’s done. With fish, the interior should be almost completely opaque; chicken and other fowl should be opaque throughout. Steaks and chops depend upon each eater’s taste.

The Flame

To judge the heat of the fire in a grill, hold your hand about five inches above the cooking surface and see how long you can leave it there.

Six seconds: low fire. Five seconds: medium-low fire. Three to four seconds: medium fire. Two seconds: medium-hot fire. One second: truly hot.

From “License to Grill”