The same goes for searing burgers, steak and vegetables, as well as grilling seafood. With a price tag well below $100, this is also the kind of grill you could have shipped to a vacation destination and wouldn’t have to feel bad leaving behind. Because the grills we tested include gas, charcoal, and electric models, we put them through separate testing scenarios.
Just make a habit of emptying it every time you clean the grill and you’ll be fine. The brick fire pits, huge in-ground pits, and giant community-sized grills customarily “manned” for traditional western and southern barbecues were not compatible with suburban back yards. Backyard barbecuers favored smaller, more portable tools like the new covered patio grills and Japanese hibachis.
So cooking on it can be a literal pain in the butt (and lower back). The Napoleon grill, which we otherwise didn’t love, is a generous 34 inches in height at the grate, making it more comfortable to work on. All you need is a Phillips screwdriver to attach the side handles, and a hammer (or even just a chunk of firewood) to tap the end caps of the wheel axle into place. One person can have the grill up and running within minutes of opening the box. By contrast, other grills we tested had cumbersome assembly processes.
It performed on par with competitors when it came to smoke flavor in our long-smoke tests, and it left a nice char and browning in our short-smoke experiments. It didn’t weber portable grill fare as well in our searing tests, however, leaving burgers looking more pan-seared than grilled. We’d also like to be able to see if the ash bin requires emptying.
Sure, you can fire up your Kettle with a small amount of coals. That’ll keep the pit from getting too hot — but, unfortunately, that also means you’ll have to constantly add fuel to keep the cook going. A digital probe thermometer like this one provides accurate grill temperatures. Lesley Stockton is a senior staff writer reporting on all things cooking and entertaining for Wirecutter. Her expertise builds on a lifelong career in the culinary world—from a restaurant cook and caterer to a food editor at Martha Stewart. She is perfectly happy to leave all that behind to be a full-time kitchen-gear nerd.
It also has two vents each on both the top and bottom, allowing for better control over heat output. It was also impressively easy to assemble, and the built-in cart and shelves (there’s no cartless option) would be welcome on weber bbq a patio that doesn’t have a worktable of its own. It takes some effort to light (do yourself a favor and buy a good chimney starter to handle this task) and arrange the charcoal, and you have to empty the ashes regularly.
The premium model adds a couple of upgrades to the nearly 70-year-old design. A built-in thermometer on the lid allows you to monitor the grill’s temperature, while a hinged grill weber bbq grate makes it easy to add coal or reposition embers for enhanced fire management. And when dinner’s done, an improved ash catcher makes cleaning up the charcoal mess even easier.
The image below on the left is the setup I used to cook the half chickens shown on the right. I mop/basted the chickens while cooking directly over the coals for an hour. The half chickens were just ready to come off the grill in the image, notice they are not burnt after one hour of direct cooking. Instead of placing the hot coals in a pile I spread them out sparsely so I have low even heat under the cooking area.