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The grills are alive

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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.

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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.

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Whatever you call it, the chefs say the heat source - whether it's wood, charcoal or gas - is important.

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