The Best Gas Grills

It’s easy to drop several hundred dollars on a gas grill and not get what you need. We’ve cooked on models that never got hot enough; models that were too small to cook more than a couple of burgers at once; models that rusted, wobbled, and warped; and models that couldn’t handle anything beyond the simplest jobs—never mind roasting a holiday turkey or smoking tender ribs. The bottom line: For the best results, you need a well-designed, responsive, durable grill.

The winner from our previous gas grill testing was discontinued, so we went shopping for some new models to test, priced at $500 or less. We focused on six major brands, asking them to help us choose their best contender. The grills in our lineup were outfitted with three to five burners, as well as two wing-like side tables. All but one grill were equipped with side burners set into one of the wings. All were fitted with warming racks, narrow wire shelves suspended across the back of the grill, and all featured built-in lid thermometers. You can buy a gas grill fully assembled or opt to put it together yourself. After trying both, we would strongly encourage you to order your grill assembled. Some stores do it for free.

We fired up the grills to cook (and smoke) a variety of foods, from burger patties to thick strip steaks to 5-pound pork butts. We checked that a 12-pound turkey fit under each lid with room to spare. We used slices of white bread to map each grill’s heating pattern, and we checked the accuracy of the grills’ lid thermometers with a calibrated thermocouple.

Along the way, we observed design elements of each grill that made cooking easier or more complicated. Scrubbing down grills after cooking and emptying grease trays showed which were simplest to maintain. And rolling them in and out of our grill garage over bumpy pavement revealed grills that fought us and rattled to pieces—literally—while others glided steadily and remained sturdily intact.

The Heat Is On

Most people choose a gas grill because it’s convenient: Turn a knob and you can start cooking in minutes. But whether that grill performs as it should is another matter. For simple grilling, the most important requirement is strong heat that spreads evenly across the grates. To determine which grills met the mark, we preheated each grill on high for 15 minutes (our standard method) and mapped the heat by covering the entire grill surface with white sandwich bread. Top grills gave us evenly browned toast. The worst made an uneven patchwork of black, brown, and white toast. Others dried out the bread, leaving it white with black stripes. Wrecked toast is no big deal, but when we grilled a quartet ... read more