Every so often a cooker stops the scroll cold. This one did: a round fire bowl on a pedestal, a steel dome hanging over it from a gantry frame, and a big hand wheel on the side — turn the wheel, and the whole hood rises on its winch, opening the fire to the sky so you can cook over open flame. Lower it back down, and the same machine closes up to smoke. It is built by Taylor Mini Smokers, a small custom shop that introduces itself with four words: Small pits. BIG flavor. Their short video of the cooker at work is here on TikTok — it is worth the half minute.
What You Are Looking At
Start at the bottom. The fire lives in a deep, round steel bowl on a pedestal base, with a fire door at the front — open it and the coal bed is right there in front of you, easy to feed and easy to rake. The cooking grate sets into the rim of the bowl. Above it all stands an A-frame gantry carrying a winch, and from that winch the domed hood hangs on cables: dome, vents, and smokestack together, rising and settling as one piece when you work the big spoked hand wheel at the side.
With the hood cranked up, this is a live-fire hearth — steaks on the grate, smoke rolling free, nothing between you and the fire but your tongs. Bring the dome down over the bowl and it becomes a closed cooker, holding heat and smoke around the food the way any good smoker should. Two machines, one footprint, and the changeover is a few turns of a wheel.
Why the Hoist Is the Idea
Grillers have been moving things up and down over fires for a long time. A German schwenker swings its grate from a tripod. A Santa Maria rig raises and lowers the grate itself to meter the heat. The Taylor design moves a different piece: the hood travels. The grate stays put, the fire stays put, and the lid decides whether you are grilling in the open air or smoking under a dome. As far as we can tell from watching their builds, nobody else on the patio is doing it quite this way — and the theatre of it, that dome rising off a smoking fire bowl, is honestly half the fun.
What We Don’t Know (Yet)
Straight talk, the way we like it: we have not cooked on one of these, and this showcase is not a review. Taylor Mini Smokers builds to order — their TikTok bio says the pits are made for backyards, pop-ups, and grillers, and that orders start with an email — but they publish no prices or spec sheets that we could verify, so we are not going to invent any here. What we can say from their own frames is that the workmanship looks serious: heavy steel, clean welds, real hardware, and a design that was clearly thought about by somebody who cooks. If one of these ever lands in our backyard, you will read the full report.
Thinking About a Cooker of Your Own?
If this has you pricing out your next pit, start with Buying Your First Smoker — how to match a cooker to your space, your budget, and your Saturdays. Already own a kettle? The snake method will turn it into a low-and-slow smoker tonight for the price of a bag of briquettes. And whatever you cook on, the temperatures chart tells you when it’s done.
Credit where it’s due: the hoist-hood cooker is designed and built by Taylor Mini Smokers (@taylorminismokers on TikTok). This showcase is editorial — not sponsored, not affiliated, and nothing here is for sale. Rendering courtesy of Taylor Mini Smokers.
