Grilling With Lava

There’s always the guy with the expensive grill. He brings it up constantly, this thing he spent money on, how well it seasons meat, how masculine the whole setup is. You smile and move on.

Bompas & Parr didn’t need a grill to make a statement. When the London duo decided to cook something, they just went for the obvious next step: actual lava. Over a thousand degrees Celsius, glowing beneath meat and corn in a backyard at Syracuse University. Professor Robert Wysocki helped them pull it off. He’d worked with lava before on other projects, but cooking with it was new.

What I kept coming back to was whether the food was any good. That’s the part that actually matters, and probably the part they didn’t think about. Did it taste incredible, or was the point just to do the impossible? The meal or the gesture?

There’s something about that kind of excess that makes perfect sense while making no sense at all. The logic: because you can, because it’s ridiculous, because no one else would actually try it. It’s the three-AM impulse, the weird thing you do just to know what happens.