Short answer: A wood fire has three phases — flame, ember, ash — and only the middle one cooks well. Flames are burning gas: unstable, sooty, and they scorch the outside of food before the inside is ready. Embers are what is left when those gases are gone: glowing embers that radiate steady, clean heat. Every serious wood-fire kitchen cooks on embers and treats flames as the machine that makes them.
People assume a grill chef wants a big fire. The opposite is true. A tall, dramatic flame in front of me at seven in the evening means I am late — that fire should have been lit an hour ago and it should be quiet by now.
What is actually burning
When a log heats up, it does not burn all at once. First it releases volatile compounds — moisture, resins, gases — and it is those gases, not the wood itself, that burn in the air above the log. That is the flame. It is bright, it moves, it looks like cooking, and it is the worst possible thing to put food over.
Once the volatiles are spent, what remains is the glowing heart of the wood itself — embers. Not shop-bought charcoal: ours are made in the hearth, from the logs we split that morning. It does not flame. It glows. That glow is radiant heat, and it behaves completely differently on a piece of meat.
The three phases, and what each one is for
| Phase | What you see | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Flame | Tall yellow flames, visible smoke | Nothing. This phase builds fuel. |
| 2. Ember | Red-orange glow, almost no smoke | Everything. Searing, skewers, fish, vegetables. |
| 3. Ash | Grey crust over dull coals | Resting, holding, slow-roasting in the ash itself. |
This is why our fire is lit long before the first guest sits down. We are not warming the room. We are manufacturing phase two, and phase two takes time. It is also why the tagline on our door is not decoration: fire, care, and a touch of patience is a working description of a grill station.
Why flames ruin food
Three reasons, in order of how often they ruin dinner.
- Soot. Incomplete combustion deposits carbon particles on whatever is above it. That is not "smoky flavour" — it is bitterness, and it cannot be seasoned away.
- Instability. Flames surge and drop as gases release. You cannot cook two identical steaks over a moving heat source.
- Wrong heat, wrong place. Flame heat is largely convective — it wraps around food and dries the surface. Ember heat is radiant: it drives into the meat and builds a crust while the inside comes up gently behind it.
There is one honest exception. A short flare-up when fat drips onto coals is not a failure; it is aroma returning to the food. The difference between that and a burning fire is control, and control is the entire job.
Oak or olive wood?
We burn both, for different reasons.
Oak is the workhorse. It is dense, it burns long and predictably, and it collapses into a deep, even bed of embers that will carry a full service without constant feeding. If we could keep only one wood, it would be oak.
Olive wood is denser still. It burns hotter, holds longer, and carries a rounder, faintly sweet aroma that suits lamb and vegetables particularly well. It is also slower to establish, so we use it deliberately rather than as a base.
What we never use is resinous softwood — pine and its relatives. It lights beautifully, burns out fast, smokes heavily and leaves a harsh taste. Wood for cooking should be hardwood, properly seasoned and dry. Wet wood does not make more smoke flavour; it makes steam, soot and a fire you are fighting all night.
How we measure heat without a thermometer
There is no probe in a bed of coals that tells you what the food will feel. So we use the oldest instrument in the kitchen: a hand.
Hold your palm at the height the food will actually sit, and count the seconds you can hold it there comfortably:
- 2–3 seconds — high. Searing: ribeye, skirt, anything that needs a crust fast.
- 4–5 seconds — medium. Skewers, poultry, fish, anything that must cook through without burning.
- 6–8 seconds — low. Whole vegetables, slow work, resting meat near the heat rather than on it.
Our grills are height-adjustable by a wheel, which means we do not change the fire to change the temperature — we change the distance. That is the whole technique, and it is why a cook here is judged on how they manage the bed of coals, not on how they handle tongs.
Why there is no gas line in this kitchen
Gas is excellent. It is instant, constant and identical every single day. That reliability is exactly what we did not want.
Two things gas cannot do. First, it cannot produce the radiant heat and the fat-on-coal vaporisation that gives grilled food its particular smell — the thing you notice from the street before you notice anything else. Second, it cannot impose a rhythm. A dial has no opinion. A fire does: it peaks, it fades, it demands to be fed at a certain hour, and it makes the kitchen work at its pace rather than ours. That constraint is the reason the food tastes the way it does.
The trade is real, and we accept it. Wood means splitting and stacking, an hour of lead time before service, ash to clear every night, and a cook who cannot walk away. On a Tuesday in February that feels like a poor bargain. On the plate, it never does.
What this means if you are sitting at our counter
You are two metres from all of it — there are no walls between the fire and the room. If the flames are high when you arrive, we are building. If the bed is glowing quietly and the cook keeps lowering a grate a few centimetres, dinner is happening exactly as it should.
Ask what wood is burning that night. It is a fair question and you will get a straight answer.
See what comes off the fire → · Book a counter seat →
Notes
- This article describes the working practice of the Maestranza kitchen: oak and olive wood, two height-adjustable steel wood-fire grills and a wood-fired stone oven, Ptolemeon 29B, Thessaloniki.
- The hand test timings given are the ranges we teach in our own kitchen. They are a practical guide, not a laboratory measurement — heat varies with fuel, bed depth and grill height.
- Written by Kostas, head chef and owner. Last reviewed 6 August 2026.