Fortune Magazine

Featured in Fortune Magazines Extreme Shopping

August 18, 1997

It Feeds a Village

Ed Brown

If you ever decide to pay $10,000 for an Iron Works Deluxe Signature Series grill, be warned: it may well be the most guilt-inducing purchase you'll ever make. The guilt will strike when you lead your friends out to the backyard, where they'll gape as you toss some thick, juicy steaks on the Deluxe Signature Series' eight-foot expanse of sturdy titanium grates. (Its three-foot little brother is depicted at right.) Because at some point it will occur to you that with this grill, the world's largest and most expensive, you could have invited everyone on your block. In fact, this grill could service a sizable town.

How sizable? This patio beast can cook up to 1,500 hot dogs an hour in adverse weather conditions--like when it's 20 degrees below zero. If you don't hold your cookouts in the dead of Minnesotan winters, your hourly output may increase to 2,000 hot dogs. Or 600 burgers. Or 130 half-chickens. Or a 100-pound pig with an apple stuck in its mouth. "It'd probably cook your mother-in-law too," jokes Paul Faaborg, the grill's inventor and president of its manufacturer, the Iron Works in Stockbridge, Mich. He also points out that this grill's "roto-convection air system" is gentle enough to bake a pie.