It isn’t the smell of smoke that greets you when you walk through the door of Peri Peri Grill House in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn; it’s the sight of it. The hard-working grill in the open kitchen exhales smoke in billows that dissipate quickly into the dining room, but not before leaving a defining mark on all the food it touches.

Chicken wings, for example, are flame-grilled, with the blackened bits to prove it, and slicked with peri peri sauce that hums with citrus and spice. But the smoke is what sticks with you.

Peri peri, or piri piri, is a chile cultivated in southeastern Africa, with roots in Brazil. The pepper — hotter than a jalapeño but not quite as searing as a Scotch bonnet — was carried to Africa and Asia by Portuguese traders, who tempered it with vinegar and lemon juice to create the sauce of the same name.