My name is Régis Calcus. Fire has been my comfort zone for twenty-five years — a way of life long before it was a job, and today both at once. I train professionals, I work with brands, and I cook outside all year round from Góis, in the Portuguese mountains.
That said, I'm not selling a dream. I pass on methods, concrete things, field experience — which is exactly what most talk about barbecue is missing.
Fire was always there. Camping out with my father. Small cast-iron barbecues set straight on the ground. A sausage on a stick, the crust, the quiet around the embers. No need to overdo it: it was simple, it was real, and it stayed with me.
I come from a line of people rooted in the concrete — great-grandparents who farmed, a father who ran his own business. At fifteen, the family house became a restaurant to support my sister's project. Service, kitchen, rhythm: that's where I really started working.
But it was becoming a cabinetmaker that brought fire back as something obvious. In the workshop I cooked on the wood stove, tagines simmering while I worked. Fire stopped being a pastime: it became an instinct, a bearing, a tool.
At twenty I built my first barbecue. I experimented, I dug. Enough to go back to study and qualify as a chef in restaurant and catering — because I wanted more than to love fire: I wanted to master it, and to pass it on with some legitimacy. I became a teacher, then a workshop lead, without ever moving away from cooking with fire.
I then founded my first barbecue school, in Belgium, drawing on Flemish smoking, French gastronomy, Belgian technique — solid, precise, often overlooked — and more widely on fire cultures from all over the world.
I considered Quebec. It was Portugal that called: land of churrasco, of daily embers. I set up my working space in the mountains, in Góis. But I never stay in one place for long — every month I travel to Belgium, France, Spain, to train, to advise, to cook.
From kamado to offset, pellet to fire pit, plancha to smoker: I keep learning the techniques, and also how to make them visible and useful.
Trade shows, judging panels, workshops, factory visits. What I do when I’m not standing over my own coals.
Three words decide everything: fire, matter, craft. A subject, a format or a brand that hooks onto none of the three isn't for me, whatever the opportunity.
I help restaurants and teams bring live-fire cooking onto their menu, and build a concept that holds up in service.
I work with human-scale manufacturers — grills, knives, boards, fermentation — in direct conversation with the people who make them.
Reels, tutorials, recipes, long-form articles, and the podcastBivouac — Conversations by the fire.
I produce content for equipment and produce brands: video, photo, writing, and real use over several weeks rather than an unboxing. What I show, I use — it's the only way to say anything useful about a grill or a knife.
I hold the Certificat de l’Influence Commerciale Responsable (Responsible Commercial Influence Certificate) from the French advertising standards authority,ARPP, in its 2.0 version. Since 2024 it carries a European dimension through the EASA: a common core of rules — transparency, fairness, protection of minors — completed by each country's specifics. In practice, a Belgian, German or Portuguese brand knows where it stands without my having to explain it.
What that means concretely: any paid content is announced as such, before the content and not at the foot of the page; affiliate links are declared; and I keep control of what I say. A brand pays for a production and an audience, not for an opinion.
The EBU Crew brings together professional European pitmasters — Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands. I co-founded it and I coordinate it.
It's neither a school nor an agency: it's a network of people who cook with fire for a living, who meet in competition, trade techniques and hold to the same standards. What one of them learns, seven countries benefit from.
As for competition, I sit on both sides of the table. Twice runner-up French champion in 2024 and 2025; in 2026, judge at theFrance BBQ Masters and European ambassador for theBBQ World Cup.
The ranking isn't the point. It's the only place where a cook is judged blind — without the setting, without the story, without the account attached to it. What's left on the plate, and nothing else.
A professional project, a training course, a brand to make known, or simply a question about a cook: the simplest thing is to write.
A question, a project, an urge to work together — write, I read everything myself.
