More than 40 years ago a man named George Stephen had had it with battling wind and rain every time he wanted to barbecue in his open brick grill. So Stephen, a metalworker at Weber Brothers Metal Works for about a decade, invented a covered metal kettle that was easy to start, regulate, and maintain in any type of weather. Today you can find Weber grills in backyards and on decks and balconies all over.
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But at the Weber Grill Restaurant on Wheeling’s restaurant row, you’ll find them in the kitchen. First opened in 1989, the chaletlike, 136-seat Weber Grill says it’s the only restaurant in the world where nearly everything is prepared on indoor Weber Kettles. Head chef Michael Varanelli remembers when the Palatine-based Weber-Stephen Products company, the restaurant’s owner, approached him. “My first reaction was shock,” he says. “I said, “You’ll never be able to keep up with the charcoal. And it will take up too much space. As a cook I can’t watch charcoal.’ But once we sat down and decided what we’d be able to do, I realized I could get this product to work in a commercial environment.”
But patrons can Weber indoors vicariously at the restaurant: the cooking can be observed through two large windows–white-clad chefs scurry around with food and charcoal, occasional puffs of thick smoke clouding the air and dissipating quickly. Wait staff wear black Weber-emblazoned backyard-chef aprons and white shirts and black ties. Ashtrays are little Weber Kettles. The ingredients for Irish coffee–a house specialty–are wheeled over on a grill and mixed right at the table, slowly swirled and warmed by a flame.
“Most restaurants are busy on Mother’s Day and empty on Father’s Day–fathers take mothers out; mothers cook for fathers,” says Fox. “But on Father’s Day we’re packed. We’re perceived as a man’s restaurant. Grilling is perceived as a “male function.’ And when the weather gets cold and other restaurants are empty in January, we get very busy–people get cabin fever.”
