I always wonder how culturally authentic these gimmicky restaurants are. Like realistically hardly anybody in America grills food in the backyard. I do it maybe 3x/year and only in the summer. I've seen my dad multiple times grill with snow on the ground, but he was an outlier.
Exactly, it's regional cooking not "American" cooking. A Texas bbq is different from a Chicago or Oakland bbq, and some people insist theirs is the only "real" kind.
BBQ varies by region, but burgers are burgers for the most part. The only real difference is usually what type of ground beef they decide to use, and if they press the meat down or not.
Aside from that, I don't think a burger in TX is gonna be much different than a burger in NYC or a burger in CA
American living in Japan here and I grill weekly on my Weber over charcoal. When I lived in Texas, we grilled whenever we could, basically. In the midwest, my grandparents had a Jenair for when the weather was bad and grilled at least once a week. They were rich, though, so there's that.
Yeah I'm not saying grilling doesn't happen a lot, just that you're unusual if you grill something more often than you for example buy a hamburger. McDonalds alone sells over 2 billion a year, and that's just them. In terms of commonness, if anything truly defines an authentic American meal it's probably a burger, fries and a drink from a fast food chain - and they're all over most of the world already.
I live in Canada and I bbq’ed dinner a couple days ago. We didn’t eat outside, of course, since it’s -10, but grilling is still a go-to method of cooking.
We do it all the time in the balkans, weather permitting. There's probably plenty of other regions where it's common. I don't know where people get the idea that bbq in the backyard is somehow an American invention.