Grillworks

His assignments with Time Magazine in the 60s and 70s took him and his wife Julia all over the world, with pivotal stays in London and Paris, where his two sons Ben and Mark were born, respectively. While in Paris Charles received an urgent new posting, to cover the expected return of Peron to Argentina. The young family picked up and trekked to their new home, Buenos Aires.

Though already an unabashed francophile, Charles was smitten by the live-fire cooking culture he found in this new-to-him capital. The Sunday Asado wasn’t simply a local pastime, it was religion. A high tradition rivaling any to be found in a chapel. 

Not only impressed with what he saw in the cities, Charles discovered the gauchos of the Pampas; ponchos worn cape-style across their backs and daggers on their belts. At night their skills at the fire would rival any cook he’d seen, anywhere. Truly the cowboys of the southern hemisphere, these romantic icons quickly had children Ben and Mark wearing gaucho hats, panchos and even slinging bolos like American kids would frisbees.

But reality interrupted the family’s newfound Argentine romance. Trouble was afoot next door in Chile and Time’s closest correspondent was Charles. Word of an impending coup sent him to Santiago in haste, leaving Julia, Ben and Mark behind in the relative safety of Buenos Aires.

It was 1973, and the most harrowing period in Charles’s professional and personal life. He learned that the safest place when the shooting started was his hotel room’s bathtub. The whereabouts of every safe basement within a sprint of the city center. And how serious journalism could be in a place where the profession was viewed as an enemy. He finally got his long-delayed appointment to interview President Salvador Allende, only to witness the presidential palace bombed on the morning of his meeting. More chilling – the appointment was kept, but with General Augusto Pinochet.

He’d had enough. Charles never aspired to be a war correspondent. He had a family and a desire to live a long life of adventure, not a short one of strife. When a chance at The University of Michigan’s Journalism Fellowship came, he seized it.

Academia suited him. The Eisendraths were happily settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan with a new family of interesting people surrounding them at the U of M. But to Charles one thing was sorely missing. Grilling. Not in the American outdoor cooking way of the time, of burgers and hot dogs over briquettes or gas, but that of Argentina. Charles couldn’t even find a grill in the United States that could perform the magic he’d seen in and around Buenos Aires.

So he set out to make one. During his academic summers he built prototype after prototype, using the traditional parrillas of Argentina as the model, but shooting for more ease of cooking over a whole wood fire rather than only over coals. Fourteen family unveilings occurred before Eisendrath was satisfied that he’d hit upon his ‘perfect’ grill. He named it The Grillery, and presented it with some fanfare to his perplexed professor friends.

But the cooking fires, the elegantly simple and attractive design of this new grill, and most notably the wildly successful dinner parties proved to even Charles’s most skeptical friends that ‘The Grillery’ was something special. Shortly his dinner guests wanted their own. Then their friends wanted one. Julia was reluctantly pressed into service taking the orders that were becoming increasingly frequent. A letter sent on a lark to food critic James Beard resulted in a call from a man who said “Hi – it’s Jim Beard, could you come to New York?” Soon after that visit and Mr Beard’s purchase of a Grillery, he began commenting on it in his column.

A patent on The Grillery was granted in 1982, and Grillworks was formally founded.

25 years of adventures in outdoor cooking followed. This little grill and its double-sized sibling graced the patios of chefs and movie stars alike. If they could find the journalism professor (and his CFO Julia), a Grillery could be made for them.