When Jason Minard noticed that his grill was badly rusted recently, he figured it was a total loss and headed to Village Hardware in East Hampton to replace it. But rather than selling him a new grill, Mark Forrester, a salesman at the shop, offered a different option: his expert grill-repair service, the Hamptons Grill Doctor.
Mr. Forrester ordered the parts, many of which were still under warranty, and got to work. When he was done, “I basically had a brand-new grill” for “only a fraction of what it would cost” for a new one, Mr. Minard said.
Mr. Forrester started his side business when he realized that “not a lot of people know about fixing grills. . . . People would throw them out.” He has been repairing them for 30 of the roughly 40 years he has been on the South Fork.
“Actually I started it then he learned from me,” his brother Adrian Forrester said during a recent conversation. Today they both repair grills as a side hustle.
The Forresters immigrated to the United States from Jamaica, when Mark was all of 19. After briefly living in Baldwin, they moved to Montauk. “My mom liked the environment. Being Jamaican,” it has the same feel as “where we came from.” Mr. Forrester moved around Long Island and eventually made his way to East Hampton, where he and many of his family members live now — they once owned four houses on the same road, Mr. Forrester and his mother across the street from each other, and two of his siblings down the road.
Regardless of who originated the idea for the repair business, it was Mark’s daughter, Ariel, 16 at the time, who came up with the name. She remembered going with her father to some of his jobs and seeing how “he can turn it [a grill] on and know exactly what ticks and what’s wrong. . . . A doctor makes you whole again, and I feel like he does that with grills.”
Mr. Forrester has by now repaired over 1,000 grills. “I learned as I went” he said. Today he believes that he can fix “100 percent” of grills, but there does come a point when repairing an old grill is more expensive than buying a new one.
He does not advertise and doesn’t need to: He receives a plethora of clients through word of mouth, and got two new ones on the day he was interviewed.
Some of them come through his work at the hardware store, and sometimes one neighbor will recommend the Grill Doctor to another neighbor. That was the case with Sheldon Kawer of East Hampton. After Mr. Forrester repaired his grill, he said it “was working as if it was brand-new.” Thanks to the Grill Doctor’s help, Mr. Kawer has been able to keep his same grill for 12 years and counting. “Services my Weber every year,” he wrote in recommending Hamptons Grill Doctor on the social media platform Nextdoor.
Mr. Forrester can be found at the hardware store or phoned at 631-384-2095.