About

THE BEGINNING

Cooking outdoors brings with it a universal sense of joy, accomplishment, and connection to people and place – and brick ovens have been aiding in this process for thousands of years.

Maybe this feeling comes from the ancient ritual of gathering around an outdoor fire and cooking? Who is to say?

All we know is that the feeling of being outdoors and connecting with people is a great joy of life, and we should all be lucky enough to experience it more often.

Long before we set out to build a new kind of brick oven, we stumbled through the long but rewarding journey of learning to craft simple, traditional brick oven pizzas.

We quickly learned that good brick oven pizza is an art of balance and simplicity.

Every ingredient and step count, from using fresh, local ingredients to the way the toppings are prepared and the way the pizza is cooked.

As we learned more about the cooking process, and the environment required to make this perfect pizza, we became increasingly drawn into the world of the amazing and ancient machine known as the brick oven.

WHY BRICK OVENS?

Brick ovens date back thousands of years and cook unlike anything devised before or since.

Despite all the advancements of science, these ancient machines still reach higher temperatures (1100+F), cook faster, and are more insulating than any other cooking apparatus.

That’s why restaurants today still use them to make the best pizza.

THE GENESIS OF THE RELIC OVEN

With our quest to make perfect brick oven pizza firmly established, we set off in search of a tool to create the necessary cooking environment in a form-factor that fit our needs.

Upon surveying the landscape of existing products, we came up short.

A traditional large oven was too large for our small urban living space, and even if we could, we couldn’t afford one.

We also wanted an oven that we could easily take with us when we moved to a new place, or could take on the road with us to an event or family cookout.

We became interested in incorporating features of Kamado-style ceramic cookers like the Big Green Egg™, but we came to understand that these cookers had limitations:

• The fire in these burns below the pizza stone floor, so too much heat is focused on the bottom of the pizza
• The hinged lid is not ideal for constantly loading and unloading pizza
• They are fragile and we had reservations about taking such an expensive unit out on the road.

Very simply, we needed something less expensive, more mobile, and more durable than traditional ovens and kamado-style cookers, but still perfectly geared to reproduce the authentic wood-fired brick oven environment.

Thus, the idea of the Relic oven was born – A modular, more portable, more durable brick oven and backyard cooker.

THE DESIGN

Designing and building our ovens has, so far, brought us just as much joy as using them.

We’ve spent countless hours dreaming and experimenting, and now we are one step closer to streamlining manufacturing.

We have created a system that is both advanced and artisan, handmade and individually imagined, yet capable of being manufactured on a wide scale.

After years of quality testing, prototype-building, and sleepless nights, we have developed the functional design necessary for such distribution.