Children of the Revolution

While barbecue is often portrayed as a middle-aged obsession, young fires burn brightly too. ISABELLE GRAY finds six of the best

There may have been a time when you asked the average young person what springs to mind at the mention of BBQ, to which they may have responded with an anecdote about disposable grills and undercooked sausages. 

But, nowadays, serious grilling is no longer reserved for the dads and the fanatics. Ben Forte, leading live chef and Kamado Joe’s marketing director reports a growth in enquiries and purchases made from people in their 20s. 

“As we’re all getting better and more serious about barbecue as a nation, it’s inspiring the younger generation, who want to master live fire too,” says Ben.

These younger fire enthusiasts might have cut their teeth on a kettle barbecue and want to take it to the next level. As consumers, they’re more eco-conscious too, seeking premium, long-lasting outdoor cooking solutions instead of something flimsy or single use.

As live fire cooking grows in popularity, what’s emerging is a new generation of chefs, creators and entrepreneurs weaving BBQ into the cultural zeitgeist. Craft beer, content creation, trendy supper clubs and travel all capture the imaginations of Gen Z and millennial audiences, and now fire is catching up. As fire threads its way into these spaces, often with a shared focus on community and sustainability, these young voices are helping to shape what BBQ looks like today.

Anna Colwell, 26, home economist and content creator

If you’ve stopped by a fire stage at a food festival this summer, there’s a chance you will have spotted Anna Colwell tending the flames. The 26-year-old professionally trained chef swapped kitchens for fire pits, now working as a home economist and overseeing the BBQ stages at events including Pub in the Park, Taste of London and Big Feastival.

“I’m very fortunate to say I truly love my job,” says Anna. She was headhunted by chef Julian Brown and Simon Taylor of Surrey Hills Butchers, who asked her to run their fire pit stage at 2023’s Big Feastival. “Coming from someone who wasn’t confident to light a gas barbecue, I was nervous,” she laughs. “But I was very lucky to work with Simon and Julian from the start – they’ve taught me pretty much everything I know.”

Now, Anna is the steady hand behind some huge fire pits. A demanding role, especially during summer heatwaves. Her job is just as much logistics as it is cooking. She sources produce, preps recipes, ensures chefs have what they need for their 30-minute demo slots, and, crucially, keeps the flames alive. 

Having had the chance to work with some big names in the grill game like DJ BBQ (Christian Stevenson) and Chops (Chris Taylor), as well as Genevieve Taylor, Ana Ortiz and Melanie Brown, Anna tells me how much she values seeing women succeed in the live fire scene. “It’s hard to find cooler people than female BBQ chefs, and it’s inspiring to think that ‘if they can do that, why can’t I?’” This year, the Underseasoned BBQ podcast unveiled their Top 150 Most Influential People in BBQ list, which included some fantastic female chefs. 

Beyond her busy summer events schedule, Anna’s home economist work has included TV shows, social media ads, and working with Tom Kerridge on his latest BBQ book. She also shares her own food content on Instagram (@alittlechilli_), with plans to focus more on fire cooking since buying her own Kadai bowl. 

“I feel incredibly lucky to be doing what I’m doing, and for Simon and Julian who put so much trust in me at the start,” she says. Her baptism of fire has clearly paid off, and she’s one to watch out for at next year’s festivals.

Joshua Ralphs, 27, chef and co-founder of Big Night restaurant

It’s easy to picture a group of chefs winding down after service, beers in hand, swapping ideas about the restaurants they’d open if given the chance. This is exactly how Hackney’s Big Night was conceived, when 27-year-old chefs Joshua Ralphs and Jack O’Connor were shooting the breeze one night after finishing a shift at Larry’s in Peckham. 

Unimpressed by how formal and upright traditional restaurants made them feel, they set out to create a radically casual dining experience, where everything hot is cooked over charcoal. Big Night (@reallybignight), named both as a homage to the 1996 Stanley Tucci cult restaurant film and after the love of a great night out, has a modest, “relatively shabby” décor (as Joshua describes it), which feels more akin to walking into a house party than into a restaurant. The space is designed so that nothing feels off-limits, blurring the lines between front and back of house. That same accessibility, in what is surely one of London’s last true bargains, is reflected in the pricing. Nothing exceeds £10. 

Blending Japanese yakitori with Eastern European influence, the menu features a mix of skewers, salads and ferments. Joshua explained how the deliberate restriction of cooking over charcoal has in fact opened them up to a wider creative exploration that focuses on flavour over technique. His favourite dessert, a sheep’s ricotta and smoked pumpkin cheesecake, with a treacle, walnut, rye and caraway biscuit base is even cooked over coals, informing its final flavour profile.

The skewer element is another fun restraint. “There has to be some level of structure to the dish,” says Joshua, describing how their chicken skewers, served with wild garlic and three-cornered leek sauerkraut, are rolled in fat which seeps into the thigh meat and layers of spring onion, and triple-dipped in a tare glaze before alchemising with the smoke and char. Cooking in this way allows them to focus on the quality of produce, much of which is sourced from local suppliers, foragers, and small British farms.

Joshua has been a chef for nine years, but his childhood, spent largely outdoors on camping, foraging and fishing holidays, has informed the way he cooks and his approach to food. After landing a restaurant job after college, he hasn’t looked back since. “Living in and moving around London has given me so many opportunities, especially with the people you meet along the way. It’s so wonderful to see so many of my friends moving up and opening places of their own.”

Building a restaurant from their own shared vision of somewhere that does not take itself too seriously, Joshua and Jack have created a space where people feel truly at home. Moments like a diner forgetting they can’t smoke indoors, or two previously separate tables continuing their night together, reinforce exactly what the two chefs set out to do. “It’s a beautiful thing to see our idea conceptually realised and come to fruition.”

Tait Miller, 32, wild chef and content creator

Wild chef Tait Miller’s Instagram account (@taitmiller) is full of the kind of videos that make you want to pack up for a day of foraging and take your cooking out into the elements. Vibrant, seasonal produce cooked over flames in leafy woodlands, or cuisines from lands far away that immerse you in their culture, his content carries the clear message that the world is out there to be explored, and food is the way in. 

Tait’s culinary path began at 14 as a kitchen porter in his local pub. His CV includes high-end private cheffing, rave-inspired supper clubs, and a stint at The Ledbury during its two-Michelin star reign. When I asked what brought the worlds of food, filming, and the great outdoors together, Tait told me he has his wife to thank for that. “Cheffing takes everything from you, and you can lose connection to the things you love,” he says. It was her simple suggestion of filming himself making a sandwich by the coast that rekindled his love for the wild. 

Now, he channels his cheffing expertise into content creation and running a production company that champions eco brands and produces travel documentaries around food, culture and community. He also leads culinary adventure tours on a live-aboard boat with Emperor Divers in Raja Ampat, Indonesia. 

“Food is this weird unifier of people. You can be on a beach in Sri Lanka talking to someone who speaks little English, but once they know you’re a chef, they light up and suddenly you’re in their kitchen looking through their spice collection, or in a field learning about tea.” 

At 32, Tait belongs to a generation that remembers life before smartphones, yet he’s excited by technology. “It’s a double-edged sword. There’s a gap between being inspired by social media and then actually getting out there and doing the thing.” 

Considering how people in cities can reconnect with outdoor cooking beyond their screens, there’s far more available to us than we think. London may have banned the use of barbecues in public parks, but there’s a lot to be inspired by, like urban foraging walks with Jonathan Cook (@johnthepoacher), or city farms and community gardens. 

Wild cheffing encompasses a broad spectrum for Tait. Whether it’s a camp stove on a mountain, woodfired scallops cooked in a Gozney, or plums picked from his grandmother’s garden, he claims the best food comes from exactly where you’re eating it, and that’s usually outside. 

Flora Phillips, 27, butcher and creator of Floffal

‘Nose-to-tail’ is a phrase bandied about in the food world, sometimes reduced to little more than a buzzword for diners chasing sustainability credentials. But for Flora (Flossy) Phillips, the 27-year-old behind Floffal, it’s an approach to eating that she takes seriously.

Flora’s self-proclaimed obsession with offal began at 11 years old. Enthralled by the taste of the dark, glossy lamb’s liver her mother had brought home, it was love at first bite. She now works as a butcher, a trade she’s incredibly proud of, and runs Floffal: a meditation on cooking, eating, and writing about offal, as well as hosting offal-themed supper clubs. 

By scavenging, foraging and using what’s already there, she documents her process on her Instagram (@floffal) as an expressive exercise. “I don’t mean to be dictatorial,” she explains. “I campaign for and through a love of offal, but not to the extent of ignoring all other meat. It’s about the whole animal. I can’t ask people to be as obsessed with it as me, but hopefully my work can ignite a curiosity and desire to understand more about what meat means.”

Her first supper club sprouted from the seeds of a conversation with someone working at her local wine bar in Camberwell, when she realised he spoke with the same passion about wine as she did with offal. Since then, her dining events have evolved across several iterations and venues. Tripe skewers, lamb hearts and her signature ‘flossages’ lend themselves very well to barbecue cooking, and were menu features this summer when she hosted at Sète in Margate as part of its BBQ series, in collaboration with Wasted Wine Club.

Having previously worked as an art dealer, what might have seemed like a career pivot to some, was a natural evolution from one creative practice to another. “To me, butchery is creatively stimulating. People reject the word ‘art’ because it’s conceptual, but there absolutely is an art to it.” 

While art and food are separate industries, the similarities between them make perfect sense as to why she has chosen this path. Butchery, like painting, is a visceral and intimate process that handles raw materials in varying texture, form, and colour. 

While she’s clear that being a woman in butchery isn’t her headline, Flora recognises that this shapes how Floffal is received. It’s still unusual to see women in the trade, and she admits it’s something she encounters daily at work. “Floffal just wouldn’t be Floffal if I were male,” she says. It’s her perspective, as much as her craft, that makes the project distinct.

James During, 36, Co.bru co-founder

From South Africa to south-west London, Co.bru’s story began the way many small craft beer businesses do: a group of mates in their kitchen experimenting with a home brewing kit. Founded by three friends in their late 20s, originally from Cape Town, it wasn’t long before the trio realised they have as much talent for beer-making as they do for having fun in the process. 

Since its beginnings, the Collaborative Brewing Company has evolved from a home project into a successful beer that has become a cornerstone of community and social events for young South Africans living in London. “One of the things we realised was that beer was a catalyst for getting people together,” says James During, now 36, who has been involved in the brewing since day one. 

With London’s saturated craft beer scene shining a light on the need for a more niche selling point, Co.bru (@co.bru_uk) models its beer around the occasions you’d definitely want to be drinking it at: social sporting events. Rather than selling through traditional retailers, Co.bru sells its easy-drinking lager at the events it hosts. Many of these take place around south-west London, where a large population of South Africans live, and include rugby, cricket and football days, as well as their flagship Salubrious Sportsdays that raise money for Ithuba, a charity providing educational scholarships to underprivileged South African children. 

If beer and sport go hand in hand, then why not add in BBQ (or braai)? The most recent sports day at Wimbledon Park was held in collaboration with newly launched BosKos, a braai catering brand founded by South African chefs Tom Mountford and Ollie Swart. While ice-cold pints of Co.bru’s Game Day lager were served up to thirsty teams and spectators, the BosKos boys were busy grilling South African classics like prego chicken and boerewors rolls over a huge live fire setup with wood supplied by Namibian Hardwood. 

“We were quite young when we started this beer company,” says James. “But one of the main reasons we did it was down to the sense of community surrounding the beer.” It’s true that the combination of cold beer, good food, and great company has a way of fostering connections that go beyond the game or the grill.

Aston Prideaux, 18, fire chef

Aston Prideaux was just 14 years old when he first picked up a pair of tongs after covid put an indefinite end to his karate career. “Back then, I couldn’t even fry an egg,” he laughs. What was intended as a fun lockdown project shared between Aston and his dad, each with their own kamado grill, he admits quickly turned into an obsession that saw him taking up the mantle as the family’s head BBQ chef. From those early days of backyard experiments, to being scouted by Tom Kerridge,Aston’s talent for grilling is as great as his enthusiasm and work ethic. 

Readers of this magazine will be familiar with Aston from his regular recipe contributions. Being invited to demo at Ludlow Food Festival by Shropshire Lad Adam Purnell, Aston made his way onto the food festival scene not long after he lit his first barbecue. At just 15, he caught the eye of Tom Kerridge, who offered him work experience across his three Marlow pubs: The Hand & Flowers, The Coach, and The Butcher’s Tap, after seeing him at Pub in The Park. By the time he had finished his GCSEs, he had secured a full apprenticeship.

That two-year apprenticeship came to an end this summer, but unlike many other 18-year-olds taking gap years and figuring things out, Aston stepped straight into another kitchen just a day after finishing up at The Coach. Now training under Exclusive Collection’s Chef’s Academy, Aston will work six months at The Castle Inn, a two-rosette pub in Castle Combe, Wiltshire, then on to the Michelin-starred Manor House hotel. 

Even with classical training under his belt, it’s fire that remains his true love. The elemental and primal appeal is what draws him in, but the modernity of social media has been key to his journey since the very beginning, picking up tips online and documenting his journey from the very start. Alongside his full-time work, Aston still finds time to post recipe content on his Instagram (@smokin_maple_meats). He tells me about his experiments with desserts, pushing boundaries with the deep, smoky flavours, like cookie dough baked with the residual heat from the BBQ, or the smoked macarons he plans to perfect. 

Having forgone the lifestyle of a typical teenager, Aston’s talent and passion for fire has opened doors for him. His training has given him a more holistic view of cooking, learning the rules so he can break them. 

“I used to like making things up as I went along, but classical French cooking taught me what I should be doing,” he says, before cheekily adding, “Now I can make it up as I go along, but better.”