I’m wondering why I have never seen the thing I have in mind. (Engineering types with ideas for specs etc. especially welcome).
It is a permanent barbecue pit, made of stone bricks or something like that, bar or table height so you can put chairs around it and with a nice edge all around it. In other words, diners sit at a table with a bbq pit in the middle. Serve thinly sliced meat and veggies and let everyone choose and cook their own while you sit around chatting. I would just make it use charcoal.
Wow. The one I linked to is $2,500 for an eight-seater octagonal table and i thought that was a lot.
One disadvantage of this sort of thing is when a breeze blows the smoke into someone’s face. At least with a BBQ grill separate from your picnic table, you can mostly avoid the smoke, but not with this sort of thing.
Based on the pics above, I wouldn’t want it. Yeah, it’s cool to have guests cook their own food (kind of like Korean BBQ, I guess?), but do you want that to be the only type of entertainment? If you’re doing family style rather than buffet, where on the table are you going to put the cole slaw and the BBQ baked beans? Or southwest style, the tortillas? Or Canadian “bbq” style, the buns for hot dogs?
That said, if I had $5k to put towards that… I’d probably allocate those funds towards other things.
But that takes nothing away from how awesome they are!
If I had the brick, the mortar, the wood, the saws, and the skills, I’d love to put one of these in my backyard.
Then, 6-8 feet away from it, I’d love to serve the food I’d cook to friends on this.
Not anywhere near as pretty.
But they’d do…
~pipe dreams~
It seems to have a very limited demand. Most of my guests really don’t want to cook their own food. I know there’s the whole Korean barbecue thing, but most of my guests aren’t into that, either. Me personally, and a select few friends, though, would adore something like that.
I don’t think there’s a big market for it, but as a high-priced niche market item for the rich guy living in Calabasas or whatever who wants something a bit different to entertain his friends with from time to time, yeah. If you custom make them to order for several grand, so you don’t have to keep inventory and all that, you might be able to eke out a few bucks from the thing. But I can’t see it as a mainstream product.
Yes, sort of like korean bbq and the links shown, thanks.
I’m thinking with the tabletop made of the same stone or brick as the rest of it. Also, I would want the top of the pit to be flush with the table, not above it.
That’s a good point about the wind possibly blowing smoke in people’s faces. Not sure what could be done about that.
It could also be used as a regular bbq pit and maybe even have a partial hard cover so the whole thing could be used as a regular outdoor table, too.
5-8k does sound awfully high. I wonder how hard it would be for someone handy-ish to design and build. Also, I am just thinking of one for my own patio, not a business venture.
If I were to try to build one, I’d start with something like a Weber kettle grill, and design the table around it. You’d obviously have to be careful about keeping any wood in the table away from the hot grill.
That’s a great idea, starting with a Weber-style grill. I was hoping to have the table part made of the same brick/stone as the rest of it rather than wood. The ones in the links look portable but I am thinking of a permanent structure.
I wonder if it would be too stupid to put it under my patio deck cover, in place of the table that’s there now. My first thought was duh, no, it will catch on fire. But when I went to a Korean bbq restaurant, it was indoors so they had ceilings and walls. Which still sounds wrong though, so I don’t know…
… Ah, right. At the Korean bbq restaurant, I think they brought the hot coals and dumped it into the table-pit, rather than actually starting the fire there. Excuse me, I am being dumb.
Now that I’ve seen that something along the lines of what I want is available to just buy and not bother building, I think that sounds better.
If anyone finds one that’s not too expensive and preferably just the pit and table (to use charcoal with rather than having a gas tank) please let me know. And thanks for your help, everyone so far.
It seems a little specific-use for a piece of furniture that size… kind of like having a trampoline in your backyard. I’d have to really, really love barbecuing with half a dozen people at once to justify something like that. And no little kids. Good lord, no little kids near that thing, thanks… and now that I look at the second link, I see that it’s a much more manageable size and propane rather than charcoal. So that one might work, particularly if it came with a cover for the grill so I could use the whole table if I wasn’t grilling.
I agree, Ethilrist, that one would be too big for me too.
This one is closer to what I have in mind although it seems overpriced for a bbq pit and table and a little flimsy, plus I’m not sure how long the wood would last.
On the other hand, it would do the job and I’m lazy. I could see my husband and I using something like this regularly.
What do y’all think? Too expensive/junky or would you buy it?
Concept is nice, i did not like the implementation on most of them.
But the use would be so low, i would probably rather have a nice big heavy steel grill/smoker combo.
Too much table gone to grill area, no room for non grill stuff on table
and no food prep room etc.
Maybe if i saw a better implementation, but it’s still going to be specific use, and then there is the issue of heat smoke and maybe flame in someones face
Hey! This may be just the thing, $160 and makes use of the big outdoor table and chairs I already have. It can just go in the garage when not in use. Thoughts?
Sounds kind of similar to Thai BBQ, which a quick Google shows to be similar to the Korean version. In the Thai version you have a small, metal cook surface with a dome in the middle that has perforations. A slab of fat sits at the top of the dome and that melts down to keep the meat from sticking to the cooking surface. Around the dome is a trough you fill with broth for cooking veggies and seafood. Looks like Amazon sells them: link. The one we used didn’t have the bowl underneath, the dome piece just sat over a concrete urn with charcoal burning in it.
So it’s not a permanent fixture like the OP describes but I agree with other posters that something like this probably won’t be used that often by most folks. The one we cooked on would probably fit over a Weber Smoky Joe, and for four it was a little crowded. I could see scaling up to fit over a full size Weber and building modular table pieces to fit around it.
