Fire in the belly

The lamb chop is delicate and smoky, sweet pink meat with a slender cap of melting, crispy fat. A brilliant green slick of chimichurri lifts each bite, bright herbs, oil and acid cutting through the richness. Next a bite of ribeye kebab: its partner is a scatter of lightly pickled onion, spiced with sumac and pomegranate seeds. Vegetarians, look away now. We’re having a day out in Twickenham: today the chaps in Gerald Laing’s huge bronze Spirit of Rugby sculptures could be clambering not for the ball, but to get into FUME, Europe’s largest-ever barbecue festival. 

A couple of months ago I was in Austin, Texas, with my 25-year-old son Theo. When we picked up our rental car at the airport the young man behind the desk instructed us, unprompted, where to eat barbecue. KG, he wrote in big letters on the receipt for our Jeep, the light of an evangelist in his eye. We got the same advice from an Uber driver, and in the Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library. We didn’t use Google or Tripadvisor; we went straight to a food truck in the north of the city where a queue of hungry customers snaked from an open window, beside wooden picnic tables and benches under a canopy to shade you from the Texas sun. 

And now the great KG has come to Twickenham. Kareem El-Ghayesh grew up in Egypt cooking with his family but studying business and economics at the University of Cairo; nearly 15 years ago he went to visit a relative in Cincinnati and on a whim took a weekend trip down to Austin and ate barbecue. “My life was changed,” he says simply. He describes his own hunger: to study Texas barbecue and its culture, to understand how it varies across the state, from the Mexican-American traditions of south Texas style, to the open pits of mesquite wood in West Texas. “If I had stayed in Egypt, I could have lived like a king,” he says. Instead, he drove Ubers and worked in kitchens to build his dream. He was just getting going when the pandemic hit and nearly destroyed everything he had built: what saved him, he said, was the community around him. He nods towards the stall occupied by John Bates’s Michelin-starred InterStellar BBQ, a few yards away. “I said to them, I’ll do whatever you need, I’ll work in your kitchen, I’ll clean up, I’ll help you out,” he said. And so both businesses survived – and thrived. 

You know who’s a big fan of KG’s cuisine? Joe Rogan, whose Comedy Mothership is in Austin. But if his podcast and personality divide the nation, barbecue enlivened by an immigrant tradition brings out the best in Americans. Barbecue – messy, communal, joyous – is food that can’t fail to bring people together. And as England fans find themselves in Texas for a sweltering World Cup, word on the street is that, just like me and my kid, they immediately go in search of barbecue.

I know we’re all supposed to be consuming less meat. I can’t say I was proud of my calorific carbon footprint on this day. And sure, the world is a shitshow, but something special happens when people come together in vast numbers to eat. This column is called In Real Life, and honest to goodness, as we sat in the sunshine, licking our fingers and full to the brim, I turned to Theo and said: “Isn’t it fabulous just to be alive?”

Illustration by Oscar Ingham/Observer Design