Ron Levy never planned to spend his career with his hands in clay and his face near a 900-degree fire. He trained as a fine arts painter, spent years in the art world, and came to the tandoor oven by a route that he himself describes as completely accidental.

The pivot came in the early 1990s, when Levy encountered a traditional clay tandoor at an Indian restaurant in New York and became fascinated by both the engineering and the cultural history of the device. The tandoor — a cylindrical clay oven that can reach temperatures no conventional oven approaches — has been used in South and Central Asia for thousands of years, and is essential to the cooking of naan, kebabs, and much of the repertoire that defines North Indian cuisine.

What Levy discovered was that authentic tandoors were difficult to source in the United States, that most restaurants were working with inferior substitutes, and that nobody was making the real thing domestically at scale. He taught himself the craft, eventually sourcing traditional clay from regions where the specific mineral composition was right, and began building and selling tandoors to restaurants across North America.

Today, his company supplies tandoors to some of the most respected Indian restaurants on the continent. He has become, by any measure, the leading American expert on a piece of equipment with a 5,000-year history.

Levy's story is an unusual one in the immigrant business landscape — a non-Indian who fell in love with Indian culinary tradition deeply enough to make it his life's work. He speaks about tandoors the way painters speak about a particular pigment or a carpenter about a specific grain of wood: with the particular obsessiveness of someone who has found their material.