Although a bit too large to be considered seriously for camping, the Napoleon also scored high in packability and transport—it collapses “like a stroller,” and has large, hefty wheels. A clip on the lid keeps everything in place in this beach- and apartment-friendly grill. The exterior hood and body are painted porcelain-enameled weber portable gas grill steel with stainless steel accents around the lid. The lid’s handle is also stainless steel as is the burner inside the grill. I’ll run through some of the main features of this grill, before listing what I liked and what I didn’t like, and then get into the nitty-gritty of what it was like cooking on this grill.
Loading up the grill in my wife’s SUV (with the seat down) was effortless as you could slide one end of the grill head first and use the handle on the other end above the wheels to pick it off the ground. Weighing in at 47 lbs, Weber designed the grill to be light for portability. The frame which consists of the legs, tool hooks, shelf, and igniter are all plastic, but the material is thick and meant to be durable to withstand the rigors of traveling.
If you use the grill only occasionally, you may need to wipe down the burner tubes to make sure they light effectively. And in general Weber’s grills have a great reputation for performance and longevity. When we surveyed over 1,000 Wirecutter readers about their grills, a large majority said they owned a Weber. And of those Weber owners, 69% said they were extremely satisfied with their grill.
That aside, foods cooked fairly evenly and sported aesthetically pleasing grill marks in our tests. Heat regulation is very easy, with one knob to control everything. And with generally good cooking results, it’s an easy model for someone to get started with gas grilling. Another tabletop option, this portable gas grill from Weber was a standout weber kettle bbq for our testers, who named it the winner of the group, and even noted its performance rivaled standard-size grills. “This thing could be priced even higher and I would buy it,” a tester noted, although at under $300, it’s attractively priced as-is. The Weber Q 1200 Gas Grill is the best of the portable propane models we’ve tested.
Senior staff writers Tim Heffernan and Lesley Stockton spent 16 hours testing portable grills for this guide. They did so on the heels of testing full-size gas and charcoal grills, as well as grill accessories. Lesley built on her decade of experience in professional kitchens (much of it spent on the grill station) to design and run all of these tests. We conducted two sets of tests for scoring, depending on whether the grill was gas-fueled or charcoal. The first step for each was to assemble the grill, rating it on the clarity of instructions and how easy it was to accomplish the task.
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While it is one of the heavier grills we tested, the wheels make moving the grill around a simple task. Cleanup is easy using a top-down approach of wiping the inside of the lid with soapy water, cleaning the grates with a grill brush, and emptying the grease collector. We found the Weber Traveler intuitive and approachable — it’s a dream to assemble, light, and use. With a similar burner and grate design to the Q 1200 but a larger cooking area and an upgrade to 13,000 BTUs, the Traveler is more suited to family-size groups than the former.
Weber says it holds 15 burgers at once but I suspect that would be a tight fit. The NOMAD portable grill sports a modern design, folding together like a briefcase for carrying, with heat dissipation in mind to keep the exterior cool while cooking. Like the PKGO, the NOMAD can function as a closed grill, or you can use each side independently as a hibachi-style cooker, doubling the cooking space. The magnetic grates stay in place when transported, are slightly domed for strength, and can invert for use as a vegetable cooker basket. One of the only problems encountered was correctly positioning the grates.
Small enough to grill on-the-go, with enough grilling space to execute an entire meal. Sign up to receive new product news, exclusive offers, grilling tips & recipes, and more from Weber and its affiliates / subsidiaries! Brandon Carte has been covering technology at BestProducts.com since 2017, where he’s been writing about the latest gadgets, appliances, and scouring the internet for the products that make life easier. His reporting has been featured on TopTenReviews.com, Good Housekeeping and USA Today.
Though some things are inherently inconvenient about a charcoal-fueled portable grill, the Jumbo Joe has some design features that make it easier to travel with. Unlike Weber’s gas grills, the Grill2Go X200 latches tightly shut with two clips on the front. This allows you to effortlessly carry the whole thing with one hand (convenient if you need to lug it a few hundred yards). Porcelain-enameled, cast-iron cooking grates provide even heat distribution across the entire grilling surface and superior heat retention. I found that the Traveler evenly distributed the heat for cooking my steak to perfection. I don’t know if I’d go as far as calling the edges “cold spots,” but my veggies didn’t heat as quickly as the burgers in the center did.