It's barbecue season, and people are heading for the hills, beaches and other picturesque locations, armed with sharp metal skewers, bags of charcoal, cans of lighter fluid, and supermarket-packaged 'variety packs' of meats and seafood to incinerate.
The Hong Kong way of barbecuing has everyone cooking their own food: people stand around with their selection impaled on a skewer and hold it over charcoal smouldering slowly in the barbecue pit. It's a sharp contrast to the Western way of barbecuing, which usually has one person manning (because it usually is a man) the grill and cooking for everyone.
'It's inefficient but it has its advantages' says Christopher Mark of the Hong Kong style. 'Everyone is standing around and talking while cooking; it's not just one person doing all the work.'
'The point of this style is basically getting a bunch of people together to drink beer; it's not about the food - it's more social,' says restaurateur Frank Sun.
Mark, executive chef of Dining Concepts restaurant group, which opened Blue Smoke Bar-B-Que last month in Lan Kwai Fong, and Sun, who had Tribute and Bricolage restaurants (both are closed) and is looking for a site for his latest project, are passionate about barbecue - so much that they prefer to use the term 'grilling'. Barbecue, they say, is a term that should be reserved for meat cooked low-and-slow in an enclosed container - the type that Mark does at Blue Smoke. But they also admit that to most people, barbecuing and grilling are interchangeable.
Whatever you call it, the chefs say the heat source - whether it's wood, charcoal or gas - is important.
