The chef
Imran cooks
two cuisines at once.
He is not a restaurant chef and has never wanted to be. He is a self-taught pit cook out of Pasadena, California who learned barbecue from Texas forums and message boards, learned seasoning from his mother's kitchen, and has spent the last several years working out exactly where the two meet.
“Barbecue people obsess over temperature and ignore spice. My mother’s kitchen was the reverse. I got lucky — I started with both.”
- 2019
A cheap kettle grill and a bad brisket
He bought a 22-inch kettle to cook for eight cousins and spent two years burning through cuts of beef in a Pasadena side yard, taking notes on every failure in a spiral notebook he still keeps.
- 2021
The offset, and learning to wait
A used stick-burner off a listing in Fontana changed the cooking entirely. Fourteen-hour cooks. Feeding the firebox every forty minutes through the night. This is where the beef ribs came from.
- 2023
The spice box goes on the rub
The turn was putting his mother's masala on a Texas rub instead of keeping the two cuisines apart. Black cardamom in a brisket rub. Ajwain in a fish butter. Nobody taught him that; it came from having both boxes on the same shelf.
- 2025
Cooking for other people's families
Word moved through the San Gabriel Valley the way it does — one engagement dinner, then four. He now cooks most weekends between March and November, mostly for events he was recommended into.
Non-negotiables
Four rules he will not bend for a booking.
The fire is lit where the guests are.
If a venue insists the cooking happens in a back kitchen, he will refer you to someone else. The cook is half of what you are paying for.
No holding food for hours.
Skewers and karahi go out within minutes of coming off heat. That means service runs in waves rather than everything landing at once, and it is worth it.
He tells you when a dish is wrong for your event.
Whole pomfret with bones in, at a formal reception, in evening clothes, is a bad idea. He will say so before you book it, not after.
The site leaves clean.
Coals doused and bagged, grease contained, no grill marks on the driveway. Nobody should be able to tell where the fire was.