The Holy Hang

At Open Fire Co., an ancient cooking practice preserves the primal energy of the past

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When Mark C. Stevens hosts a barbecue, the food is merely—well okay, vitally—a tool for the thing he’s truly trying to foster: human connection. The spectacle of entire chickens, pineapples, cabbages, and fish heads hanging above a roaring fire is just one piece of the tableau, which includes the ancestrally familiar scent of the smoke, the comfort of the heat, the mesmerizing draw of the flickering flame, and the sense of communion between the fellow humans that surround it. “You can see it in people’s eyes,” said Stevens, who is a world traveler, fire cook, and filmworker. “You can just see this sense of pure wonder.” 

It's a sensation he experienced himself years ago, while hiking the backcountry of Argentina. In between treks, during which they’d hardly eat anything, he and his posse would come out of the woods and fuel themselves with massive banquets of barbecue and steak. “It was true feast or famine,” said Stevens. At one point, some Argentinian friends invited them to their home for a meal. When they arrived, the scents of the cooking food were coming from fires set in pits dug into the ground. “It was really rustic, and people were, like, putting food in our mouths with their hands, like ‘try this,’” recalls Stevens. It conjured memories of camping with his family as a young boy, eating in a circle around a fire. “It reminded me of how much can be done on the fire, cooking-wise, and the vibe it creates,” he said. “Just the communal aspect of being around a fire and eating the things that come off of it—this primal, rustic energy that it creates. And I felt impassioned to keep exploring that.” 

The following summer, he returned home to New Orleans and bought a backyard fire pit. Almost every weekend, he and his friends would set up at one of their houses and invite whoever was around to come over, and to bring something to cook. “We never knew what was going to show up,” he said. It might be a pumpkin, or a steak or a chicken; occasionally, somebody’s old vegetables, or ducks their dad went out and shot. “And we would just look at each other, start a fire, and figure out how to cook it.” The sense of surprise and experimentation of that summer fueled Stevens’ growing infatuation with fire. 

“Fire cooking has been around for hundreds of years,” he said, reflecting on what continues to enchant him about this approach to cuisine. “And every culture has some sort of fire cooking, every single one. Pick a place, and at some point, they said, ‘Hey, let’s heat this food up.’ Wherever you come from, our ancestors all did that at some point. You have this universal thing that everybody can claim, and nobody can claim as well.” 

In 2017, Stevens was staying with friends in Vermont, working on completing his cookbook Cooking with Spices: 100 Recipes for Blends, Marinades, and Sauces from Around the World. As a thank you for allowing him to turn their back shed into a writing nook, he prepared one of his signature open fire barbecues. Wandering around the backyard, searching for the right place to set up, he noticed a beautiful tree overlooking a hill. “And that was sort of like the moment, ‘Oh we can hang stuff,’” he said. 

The theatrical, altarlike effect of food hanging above a fire, for Stevens, elevated the already-holy experience all the more. “And I think that it’s also the best way to cook food, because the flavor doesn’t hit you in the face with smoke like a closed-smoke barbecue. Instead of making smoke the main character, open air, hanging barbecue complements—heightens—the flavor of the meat, or whatever you’re doing.” (Stevens points out that he welcomes the creative challenges of orchestrating a totally vegan barbecue.) 

"Every culture has some sort of fire cooking, every single one. Pick a place, and at some point, they said, ‘Hey, let’s heat this food up.’ Wherever you come from, our ancestors all did that at some point. You have this universal thing that everybody can claim, and nobody can claim as well.”

—Mark C. Stevens 

Drawing inspiration from other suspension barbecue techniques the likes of Argentine celebrity chef Francis Mallmann’s famous hanging dome—Stevens started experimenting. “It evolved from a tree branch to a metal bar, and then a three-pronged metal bar,” he said. 

And then, in 2019, while he was producing a film, some of the special effects guys had gotten word of Stevens’s hobby. They asked him if he could build anything for his barbecue set up, what would it be? On the back of a script page, he sketched out his dream apparatus—a massive square “fire cage” with adjustable, swinging grills. 

Two weeks later, the same guys dragged Stevens out to the parking lot, where they unveiled a real-life iteration of his fire cage fantasy. “Those guys were just working on this movie, and they had time to kill, and they had all this extra material,” he said. They told him that it was made from leftover speed rail from the Mission Impossible movie. Laughing, he admitted that he didn’t know if this was true. Regardless, he has remained eternally grateful, and the fire cage to this day remains at the center of his open fire experience. 

Within the next year, Stevens had started hosting mini-fundraisers for local causes with his hanging barbecue apparatus, in addition to regular hangouts with his friends. “And then the pandemic,” said Stevens, who—right as the world was shutting down—hopped on a plane to Australia to be with his girlfriend (now wife), the photographer Jess Kearney. 

For the next four years, Stevens traveled back and forth every few months between New Orleans and Australia. When he was down under, he filled his time by hosting barbecues. “I really established a little fire community there,” he said. He’d charge just enough to cover the costs of his equipment and ingredients—relishing the opportunity to experiment with Australian cuisine and introduce New Orleans cuisine to the Australians. Barbecue shrimp and polenta, crocodile arms served like chicken wings, kangaroo legs. From the local fishmonger, he'd collect discarded tuna heads and tails—using the delicate, slow-smoked cheek meat to serve fish tacos. “The possibilities were endless,” he said. 

“The fire, the smoke, I want it to feel like something eternal. This feeling of total immersion in which whatever you can’t see around you doesn’t exist. Your emails and your phone, you don’t check because you forget about them.”

—Mark C. Stevens

In November 2023, Stevens and Kearney moved back to New Orleans full-time. With the film industry in shambles, he decided to go all-in with Open Fire Co., partnering with fellow Louisiana native Jake Williams to offer totally bespoke fire cuisine experiences in destinations ranging from New Orleans courtyards to someone’s camp in the woods. 

When Stevens and Williams arrive on location, they'll walk the area, looking for opportunities to integrate. “If we can use an old wagon wheel, or hang meat off of an awning or something to heighten the experience, we’ll do that,” said Stevens. 

The site-specific approach is integral to the vision of Open Fire Co., which is inspired by biophilic design—a concept that aims to connect people to nature. “I want people to walk up to the location, see our set-up, and feel like it has always been there,” Stevens said. “The fire, the smoke, I want it to feel like something eternal. This feeling of total immersion in which whatever you can’t see around you doesn’t exist. Your emails and your phone, you don’t check because you forget about them.” Fire, after all, was something like the first screen, said Stevens. “It’s the thing we stared at.” 

Over the past year, Open Fire Co. has cooked for fundraisers, weddings, birthday parties, and most recently, and most recently, staged an elaborate hang at the St. Francisville Food & Wine Festivals' BBQ & Bubbles event. “The good thing about doing this in Louisiana—” said Stevens, “it's not hard to convince people to spend all afternoon drinking and eating.” 

The experience is about more than that, though, for Stevens. The greatest compliment people have offered him after hours spent around his fires is that, “This day was absolutely amazing. I will never forget this . . . and the food was also incredible.” 

“They’re not even talking about the food first—and the food has to be fantastic for this to work, let me be clear—but they’re talking about something else,” said Stevens. “And like, what is that something else?” 

openfireco.com.