Smoke and Lump is my UK BBQ site. It’s all charcoal and kamado. I don’t review gas grills — ever. I don’t take payment to recommend a kit, and I don’t publish anything I haven’t either cooked myself or properly read up on.
If you’re upgrading to a £1,200 kamado and want to know whether the £1,800 model is worth it, you’re in the right place.
Who’s behind it
Ben Austen runs the site. I’m not a chef. I’m not a professional reviewer. I’m someone with a London garden, a love of BBQ cooking, a Big Green Egg Large my sister Kate gave me for Christmas 2025, and more than twenty cooks of notes that turned into “maybe I should write some of this down.”
What I’ve done with BBQ is enough cooks to have opinions and not enough to pretend I know everything. Long-and-low pork belly and shoulder, short ribs, and a few fails along the way. The site reflects that — confident on what I’ve actually done, openly humble on what I haven’t.
Kate Austen is my sister and a contributor here. She was the youngest female 2-Michelin-starred head chef in the world, and the first female to win the main course on Great British Menu in the show’s history. She now runs her own food brand at kateaustenfood.co.uk. Her lane on Smoke and Lump is her own — recipes, meat reviews from a chef’s palate, and technique pieces on low-and-slow, smoking and fish. She doesn’t write the kit reviews; that’s not her world.
If a piece on Smoke and Lump has Kate’s byline, she wrote it. If it has mine, it’s my cook, my photos and my opinions.
How I do reviews
Three kinds of pieces, and they read differently on purpose:
Tested — I cooked on the kit. Long enough to have a view on how it lives day to day, not just first impressions. The piece says “I” with full authority because the cook actually happened. There’s a section on what it does badly. There’s a section on who shouldn’t buy it. The verdict is plain.
Researched pieces — I haven’t cooked on it. I’ve read what the people who have, said. The piece reads “based on what other reviewers say,” not “I tested.” You can tell within a few seconds which kind of page you’re on.
Best Of — category guides (“best first kamado under £700,” that sort of thing). Skim-readable, tighter prose, picks labelled inline. Designed for someone with a phone and a shopping window of three weeks.
Full editorial detail lives on the Editorial Policy page — including how AI is used, the template every Tested piece follows (up to 16 sections), and the lines I won’t cross.
Disclosure
Every piece that involves kit or food I didn’t pay for at retail price says so, prominently, at the top. When Kate joins as a bylining contributor and a butcher sends her a brisket via her own brand for review, the disclosure box will name both parties and the chain of supply. If a manufacturer lent me a BBQ for review, the piece says so and tells you when (and to whom) it was returned.
The full record of every supplier, brand and contributor relationship lives on the Disclosures page, kept as a running log. I don’t bury that information.
I’m not a member of any affiliate programme, so nothing here earns commission. If that changes, the Disclosures page will carry it first. Commission will never change a verdict. I write the verdict before the commercial decision.
What this site isn’t
- I don’t review gas grills. The brand isn’t built for that, and I’m not the right person to review them.
- I don’t take payment to write favourably about a product. That’s not a “mostly don’t” — it’s a hard line.
- I use AI to help write this site. I talk it through after each cook, and it turns my notes into a first draft. Then I go through it line by line and change anything that isn’t what happened or doesn’t sound like me. The cooks, the photos and the opinions are mine. If I haven’t cooked on something, the page says so.
- There are no fictional contributors. Every byline is a real person with a real face.
Get in touch
Press, partnerships, factual corrections, or you cooked something on a kit I reviewed and want to share notes:
ben@smokeandlump.co.uk