Grilling uses heat from above. It’s good for gratinating, toasting, caramelizing and cooking small cuts of meat or fish. It’s a pretty handy method because it’s almost a dry heat so you can get things very crunchy and crisp, depending on the temperature.
Chargrilling is a sexy way to cook and basically stems from what we would call a barbecue. These days we have ridged griddle pans that can go on a gas hob, and in restaurants we have chargrills which are gas-fired with coals underneath — these retain the heat. They give great colour and flavour, but the real genius way of chargrilling is how they cook over hot coals in Turkey using wood chippings, which is like our way of barbecuing. The flavours that the coals give are absolutely sublime when you learn to gauge the heat — i.e. having a high pile of coals at one side for searing heat and colour and then just a few coals on the other side to slow down the heat, so that everything cooks in the centre. Chargrilling is fast and effective and is generally used to cook first-class quality cuts of meat and fish — even whole fish if they’re small enough. The thing to remember is to always get your griddle pan really hot before cooking on it, and never add any oil to the pan otherwise it will smoke you out of the house!