Ribs cooking over a live fire at the 2018 Houston Barbecue Festival.

Trattoria Al Parco in Buttrio, Italy, cooks meat on a live fire grill known as a fogolar.

Live fire grill from Mill Scale Metal Works used by Micklethwait Craft Meats at the 2019 Texas Monthly BBQ Festival.

The live fire grill at Harlem Road Texas BBQ in Richmond is a unique contraption used by pitmaster/owner Ara Malekian.

Live fire cooking at the 2018 Houston Barbecue Festival.

When the weather turns cool and the fragrance of smoldering coals wafts over our neighbor’s fence, we are reminded that grilling season has arrived.

It’s only a matter of time before we roll out the kettle grill from our own garage, dump in a sack of charcoal, light it up, crack open a cold beer, and wait patiently as our New York strips get crusty on the outside and pink in the middle.

Grilling over coals is a time-honored tradition. In a way, it’s a continuation of a method of cooking that is certainly thousands of years old. The principle has certainly stayed the same: make meat tastier and more tender by applying heat and smoke.

Like many culinary traditions over the last 20 years, grilling has gone upscale, often referred to as “live fire” cooking. At minimum, a cooking appliance with a long trough for coals and burning wood sits beneath grates that can be moved up and down with a wheel or levers.

Many of these live fire appliances and recipes are another example of “what’s old is new again.”

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9823 Harlem Road, Richmond; 832-278-2101

When it comes my own experiences with the best live-fire meats that aren’t Texas barbecue, I can recount several that are memorable.

In the Belgrano neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina, sits a small steakhouse called El Pobre Luis with an expansive live-fire grill, a parrilla, used to cook steaks and other meats, asado. We sat at small wooden tables surrounded by futball jerseys of the local neighborhood clubs as well as the big-name teams like Boca Juniors and River Plate.

In between swigs of world-class Malbec wine, the asador, or grill cook, sent out plate after plate of chorizo and morcilla sausage, ribeye cap, and sweetbreads, among other cuts. If you’ve ever been to a Brazilian-style steakhouse in Houston, you’d recognize this menu, but at half the price.

Back in the Northern Hemisphere, I made a trip to the northeast of Italy, specifically the town of Buttrio, where the live-fire tradition is based on a grill known as a fogolar. In homes of the region, it is a combination of fireplace and cooking grill. In restaurants, the fogolar sits atop a brick plinth that holds a layer of coals over which grates are hold the prodigious cuts of Chianina beef.

At a restaurant called Trattoria Al Parco, 6-inch-thick slabs of porterhouse steak are charred on the outside and left cool on the inside. All washed down, again, with inexpensive, local, world-class wines like Schioppettino and Refosco.

Closer to home, one of my favorite live-fire grills is at Harlem Road Texas BBQ in Richmond. Here, chef and pitmaster Ara Malekian presides over a contraption like no other I’ve ever seen: a 10-foot tall, tripod-like device holds a multi-level grate that hovers over a tray of burning wood and coals.

Depending on the weather, Malekian will fire it up on weekdays to cook fajitas, vegetables, shrimp, whole lamb, salmon on a cedar blank, and even scallops. Mostly, the grill is used in the fall.

“I try not to use it during the heat of the summer because it puts out a lot of heat,” says Malekian.

However, like most culinary techniques, live fire cooking comes down to the skill of the grill cook, rather than the price of the grill.

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Far from using upscale or high-end equipment, many steak and fajita cooking competitions still require the cook to use a humble kettle grill to produce their entries. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A native of Beaumont, J.C. Reid graduated from the University of Southern California after studying architecture and spent his early career as an architect in New York City. He returned to Texas in 1995, retiring from architecture but creating his own Internet business in Houston. As his business became self-sustaining, he began traveling Houston and the world to pursue his passion: eating barbecue.

He began blogging about food and barbecue for the Houston Chronicle in 2010 and founded the Houston Barbecue Project in 2011 to document barbecue eateries throughout the area. Just last year, Reid and others founded the Houston Barbecue Festival to showcase mom-and-pop barbecue joints in the city. The 2014 event drew 2,000 guests to sample meats from 20 restaurants.

You can view more of J.C.'s work at jcreidtx.com.

"Given the increase we are seeing in omicron, we could very possibly be at 100 percent omicron by January," said Dr. Wesley Long, medical director of diagnostic microbiology at Houston Methodist.