A Tandoor Oven Brings India’s Heat to the Backyard

In fact, he had never heard of tandoors — Indian clay cooking vessels that are part oven and part barbecue pit — until 1986, when a New York gallery exhibited six-foot pots he had made, inspired by amphorae on Crete. A man with an Indian accent called, wondering whether Mr. Levy, a ceramic artist, could make a large pot with a tapered mouth, no bottom and no glaze: a tandoor.

After it was installed at a Columbus Avenue restaurant called Indian Oven, word spread through the Indian community, and orders began to pile up.

“It came to the point where I had to stop doing my ceramic artwork, and focus on tandoors full time,” Mr. Levy, 63, recalled.

So he converted his studio on Mulberry Street in Little Italy into a tandoor factory. Over the past three decades, he has built more than 2,000 for restaurants across North America, including the Bombay Club in Washington and Bukhara Grill and Dawat in Manhattan, and as far away as Mexico, Belize and Fiji.

“Coming from a fine arts background, it was very satisfying to make something so functional and so useful,” Mr. Levy said. “I think of it as ceramics that feeds the body, in addition to soothing the soul.”

Now Mr. Levy has developed a tandoor for home use, the Homdoor. It starts at $1,200.

One of them, a waist-high clay pot sheathed in stainless steel and looking vaguely like a “Star Wars” robot, sits just outside the ceramics studio on Islamorada in the Florida Keys, where he now lives. With palm trees and the azure ocean as a backdrop, sparks and flames from glowing charcoal shot from its mouth.

Michael Ledwith, the chef of Hungry Heron Catering nearby, threaded spice-crusted rectangles of steak onto long metal skewers and patted yeasted dough into the flatbread naan. Mr. Ledwith seasoned the beef with an aromatic mixture of ground pepper, mustard and fennel seeds, and grains of paradise, dried black berries in the ginger family that taste like a cross between black pepper and allspice. The beef came out of the blast-furnace heat of the tandoor with an explosively flavorful crust and uncommonly succulent center.

The traditional tandoor that Mr. Levy set out to copy 30 years ago was typically an unfired vessel, the clay walls strengthened with straw and animal hair.

“It was very unsanitary,” Mr. Levy said, adding that ovens shipped to the United States “often arrived from India broken, or would crack with extended use.” The tandoor’s shape, a cylinder with sloped clay walls, has remained essentially unchanged for 5,000 years.

Mr. Levy’s first innovation was to fashion the body from a blend of earthenware and stoneware, the former chosen for its modeling and expansion properties, the latter for its ability to withstand high heat without cracking. For porosity (an essential quality so that flatbreads can cling to the oven’s inner walls), he added finely ground fired clay, known as grog. For insulation and extra strength, he developed a clay and vermiculite mixture that could be baked onto the exterior of the pot.

Finally, he devised a sturdy stainless steel housing, so the tandoor could be sold and installed as a movable, freestanding unit.

“We’ve been using Ron’s tandoors for the last 20 years,” said Vicky Vij, an owner of Bukhara. “They outlast any Indian clay tandoor. They’re masterpieces.”

As demand and production picked up, Mr. Levy bought an enormous Hobart mixer, which he was told came from an old Navy ship, to blend the clay. He built plaster molds to shape the ovens.

After the pots are formed, each one is turned by hand on a giant wheel to smooth the interior. The tandoors are dried, then baked at 2,000 degrees in a gas-fired kiln for seven hours, transforming the soft clay into hard, heat-resistant ceramic. The entire manufacturing process takes about two weeks.