Anthony Rubano doesn’t need to start a fire to assert his masculinity. But he recognizes that man’s need to control flame persisted long after he stopped killing his own meat and burning it outside the cave.
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“I am actually very poor at barbecue cookery,” says Rubano, who grew up in Buffalo Grove and got a master’s in architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “In my family you’d go outside and cook on the grill, but it was never this be-all and end-all of suburban experience. So I’m not sure why I chose it.”
“This was after the Depression and hard times, when your father worked in the coal mine, dammit, and sweated and saved,” says Rubano. “And here you are in management or even a blue-collar job where labor has won and you work an eight-hour day. Perhaps subconsciously you weren’t as manly a man as your father. Perhaps this barbecue thing was some kind of way to reclaim the masculinity that may have disappeared after the war. Your wife may have been making bombers, and now you come home, and she returns to the home. Now where’s the manly man stuff for the guy to do? There was the yard work, or home improvement–or this transparent control of fire that barbecue offered.”
