The Birth of A Grill Designer
How a father’s hobby set the stage for an Argentine Grill fire in his son.
Where Christmas happens for the Eisendraths.
One gift under the Eisendrath tree a few years ago was a weathered little box. It was from my father, known for strokes of genius around holiday time—genius that could range from practicality all the way to the dried, mounted piranhas or nine-foot boathook end of the spectrum.
This one brought all the memories flooding back.
My tools.
Marked "you can't properly run a grill company without your tools" in Dad's illegible reporter's handwriting, the cardboard was bound with cracked rubber bands that snapped as I worked them off the box. Inside lay a jumble of tiny metal pegs. These were what my 10-year-old self had used, along with a rubber mallet, to stamp the serial numbers into Dad's grills.
In those days Grillworks' corporate headquarters occupied Dad's bottom left desk drawer, and his framed first patents were on the kitchen wall. Mom's scratchy answering machine message welcomed all callers to "The Eisendraths and Grillworks Incorporated," and the University of Michigan switchboard knew to direct Argentine grill inquiries to the journalism department.
But 25 years on, by the turn of 2000, the company was producing only a trickle of new grills. Still only in the two original sizes: The 24” Grillery and the 42” , dubbed the ‘San Antonio’ for the first customer to commission one. Dad's last metalsmith was to call it quits shortly, his back too worn to move the steel anymore.
Regardless, calls continued to come, curious chefs showed up to meet Dad, and a few dusty grills stood waiting in the family barn. Grillworks drew shallow breath; the company was still present in my mind.
So in 2005, 28 years after I hammered my last serial number, it was still a trauma to get the call from Dad saying he would officially shut down Grillworks.
Asked why, Dad answered simply:
"I've had my fun."
To me, those words felt like learning that a family member was passing.
A few months later, with Grillworks already dormant(but still ours), brother Mark and I met Dad in Argentina for a fishing trip. This country, a grill-Mecca, was our home in the early '70s and remains the place that most inspired the Grillery's design. Since father-son talks in our family traditionally occur over water, this was also the setting for my career counseling. I'd spent 10 years at a major dot-com and was considering options farther along the tech path. The fishing proved excellent, but answers were elusive.
Pira Lodge
The Argentine lodge we stayed in, Pira, hosted large, communal dinners. One night our table happened to include an entrepreneur who had married into one of the largest grill brands in the world. He knew the Grillworks name. Dad, seizing on his opportunity to close the final chapter, told him Grillworks was for sale.
Horror twisted my gut.
"Dad. Wait."
And I had my post-tech answer.
Restarting Grillworks was far from an obvious career choice. Writers, professors, museum curators, lawyers, and artists dominate the Eisendrath family tree. To find ancestors who invented actual objects you have to look back a long way. And after his swashbuckling early career as a TIME foreign correspondent, Dad was perfectly content to "just" be a journalism professor. His personality and passion birthed the little grill company, but he (and he said this often) never wanted building grills to resemble work. And I was a liberal arts-educated technology exec—career maker of things you can't touch. Hardly the resume for a Grillworks phoenix to rise on.
But at the 2011 60-strong family reunion, during a lecture about our entrepreneurial German ancestors, Dad looked around at the modern Eisendraths and leaned over to me with a look of wonder on his face. "Do you know you might be the only real businessman here?"
When you grow up inside a family passion you form opinions about it. They pile up. You reach adulthood with a mountain of them: the "how it's done" things, "how it should've been done" things, and "that was idiotic" things. These could be about raising horses or competitive water skiing. Or they could be about designing open-fire Argentine grills. Given the right conditions—like watching their source offered to a stranger —they cascade out. And the skills you picked up through actual education, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, shape the landslide into something you can use. Digital expertise transforms oily shop scribbles to 3-D renderings. Music event fliers from a former hobby become brochures. And thousands of hours of corporate PowerPoint become "I never want to do that again."
As a child I offered Dad awful suggestions for grills at the dinner table. I am deeply relieved that he ignored those back then, but even he now recognizes that the ideas were already beginning to come out of me. Now they flow unchecked.
People too often say “follow your passion.” I say do what comes out of you.
