ATLANTA

IN 1974, Ed Fisher opened a store here called the Pachinko House to sell the upright pinball games of that name that he imported from Japan. He also shipped in ovoid earthenware grills called kamados. But they only collected dust in the back of that strip-mall storefront until he began cooking chicken wings with them and fanning the smoke toward the street to attract shoppers.

“We were selling something called a kamado from a place named after a pachinko,” recalled Mr. Fisher, who first saw the charcoal-fueled cookers in the 1950s as a Navy lieutenant in Japan. “That didn’t sound American, and that wasn’t easy. But once I got people to try one, once they tasted the chicken we cooked on them, they were hooked.”

Giving them a distinctive green, dimpled surface and a catchy name helped. So did that cool shape, which looked somehow countercultural when compared with conventional grills.

Now, more than 2,000 retailers across the nation stock Big Green Eggs, the brand of ceramic kamados that Mr. Fisher eventually developed, with sales, he said, growing by more than 20 percent every year for the past two decades.