Almost everyone loves barbecues, that ancient feeling of placing food on the fire and watch it while you cook it.
Our first tabletop barbecue (and the first great piece of Adorno as a union of Mariana and Alberto) was born thanks to the commission of chef Alfonso Aranda, in charge of the Carpe Diem Lounge Club restaurant in 2014.
The Thai BBQ has behind it many hours of work thinking about all the details: that it does not burn the table, that the waiter can transport it with total safety, that the diner cannot get burned, that it be beautiful and elegant, that it represents the aesthetics of the restaurant … and that it works! Many times, in restaurants, gadgets like a tabletop barbecue are just props, food is cooked in the kitchen, in this case that was unthinkable.
A requirement/challenge put by the chef was that it could not have 4 legs. That led us to look for new forms and, inspired by the fact that it was a seafood barbecue, we designed the wave-shaped structure, which finally became a closed wave, an allegory of the continuous movement of the sea and more stable (we must keep in mind that burning embers are being transported and all precautions are little).
One of the first limitations we got rid of was the grill design. The typical grill design is very practical and inexpensive, but not fancy and unattractive. So, we decided to adapt one of the main elements of the restaurant logo to the grill: the lotus flower.
To increase the intensity of the experience the barbecue has a lid.
THAI BBQ for the Seve restaurant in Rotterdam, a member of the CDLC family.
With the accumulated experience and the good results that the Thai BBQ gave, in 2016, with the change of menu of the Ikibana restaurant, we undertook the design of another tabletop barbecue.
Here we encountered several challenges (in addition to those we already dealt with the Thai BBQ): the size of the tables forced us to design a smaller barbecue, the budget was tighter and there would be a very small production of barbecues… we had to rethink completely barbecue.
After several models and thanks to the non-negotiable persistence of the sous chef Nerina who pressured us to continue rethinking the barbecue as many times as necessary (thanks Nerina! We will never thank you enough) we have one of those crazy ideas that anyone “sensible” would rule out and we usually say “why not?”: make a wooden tabletop barbecue.
Spoiler: it’s not just wood.
What seemed like a crazy idea turned out to be a very good idea. By manufacturing them in wood we could make much smaller barbecues and, by manufacturing them one by one, very small series can be produced and the price does not skyrocket.
Both the exterior shape and the grill of the Iki BBQ recreate the restaurant’s logo.
In 2019 Jordi Guillem, from the Lo Mam restaurant at Le Méridien Ra Beach Hotel & Spa, commissioned us a new tabletop barbecue to cook hunting meat.
Inspired by the image of the forest, we designed this barbecue with Om wood, which has a very marked grain and very interesting changing tones. This time we chose organic shapes for the exterior structure, almost like a stone worn down by the passage of water, a shape and texture that invite you to caress it.
And for the grill, if we are in the forest, leaves. Leaves like the ones you see when you walk through the forest and look at the ground to see where you step.
The elegance of the contrasting dark color of the wood and the silver of the stainless-steel grill made the Wood BBQ an object of desire for all chefs who have seen it. So much so, that very soon you will see it in the restaurant of a luxury hotel that will open its doors in Madrid shortly.
