The Best Gas Grills

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.

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 of pricey, thick New York strip steaks, the same thing happened. Spreading 4-inch burger patties across the hot grills, we saw those heat patterns a third time.

So what made the difference in how well food cooked? While manufacturers may try to dazzle customers with their burners’ high BTUs (British Thermal Units, a measure of heat output per hour), in our tests this number turned out to be less relevant than the grill’s construction and heat distribution. All gas grills share a similar construction: At the bottom, perforated metal tubes (the burners) produce a row of flames when the gas is ignited. Above them are metal heat diffusers shaped like inverted Vs. As we used the grills, we realized that these tent-like bars are very important. First, they shield burners to keep fallen food from clogging holes. Second, when dripping fat hits them, the fat turns into smoke that makes food taste grilled (they are sometimes called “flavorizer bars” for this reason). Third, and perhaps most important, they help spread heat horizontally across the grill. The flames’ heat wants to rise straight up, and without these tent-like bars to deflect it there would be distinct hot spots directly over each burner and cooler zones everywhere else.

All of the grills we tested had bars right over each burner, but our top-performing grills had further design tweaks to help spread out the rising heat for more even distribution and much-improved cooking results. One achieved this with extra bars between the burners, while the other featured a full layer of perforated stainless-steel plates beneath the grates, which, like the tent-like bars, diffused heat.

While powerful, even heat is critical in a good grill, so are a few other factors. First up: capacity. Sometimes you want to feed a hungry crowd. When we packed our grills with hamburger patties, the results were surprising. While the grills in our lineup featured different numbers of burners, more burners didn’t always correspond to more cooking space. The “smallest” grill—the only one with just three burners—held 19 burgers, while one of the four-burner models fit just 15 burgers. As it turned out, the four-burner grill was only 2 inches wider than the three-burner model (they were the same depth), a negligible advantage that was negated by the fact that the four-burner grill’s wide warming rack blocked access to the back of its cooking grates. Other grills shared this design flaw.

Grate material also mattered: Our two highest-ranking grills had cast-iron grates, while most of the lower-ranked ones used stainless steel. Cast iron did a better job of transferring heat for crisp, flavorful grill marks. Finally, the angle of the open lid also mattered. Curved, low-angled lids directed smoke right into our faces, even when fully open. Our favorite grills had lids that opened wide to let smoke flow straight up.

Direct cooking is important, but a good gas grill must also excel at cooking with indirect heat for roasting large cuts of meat or smoking them low and slow. To do this, after preheating the grill, you leave one burner on, turn off the rest, and set the meat over the unlit burners. For our test, we put wood chip packets over each lit burner and set pork butts (each cut into three pieces) over pans of water on the cooler side of each grill, maintaining a temperature of 300 degrees by watching the grills’ lid thermometers. All of the roasts should have reached an internal temperature of 200 degrees in 4 hours, yet even after a whopping 7 1/2 hours, some roasts still weren’t done. Others yielded tender meat but no smoke flavor. Only one grill rendered the meat both tender and smoky.

We realized that the problem causing this almost-uniformly poor performance lies in the grills’ construction and is, in fact, endemic to gas grills.

For indirect grill-roasting or barbecuing on charcoal, you push all of the coals to one side of the grill, put the meat on the other side, and then adjust the vents to customize heat level and airflow, putting the lid vent over the meat on the cooler side to draw heat and smoke over it. But all of this control is out of your hands with gas grills. The clamshell-shaped “cookbox” on a gas grill has nonadjustable vents, and all of those vents are in one place: across the back of the box. That means hot air and smoke flow in one direction when the lid is closed: straight out the back of the grill. This didn’t cause a problem with our previous winning grill (nor with several other models from our last testing). Its burners ran from side to side, so we could send the smoke and heat over the meat by turning on the burner in the front of the grill, putting the wood chips on this burner, and putting the meat directly behind. Heat and smoke traveled front to back, over the meat, on the way to the vents. But the burners in all of the grills for our current testing run from front to back. We’re not sure why manufacturers have all gone this route, but it means that the lit burner with the chip packet is always to the side of the meat, and so heat and smoke travel straight back to the vent—bypassing the meat.

Because of this, the integrity of the cookbox—specifically the box material and the number and position of the vents—became essential to success. Even though we had confirmed that the lid thermometers were all accurate and we had been adjusting the heat as needed to maintain a temperature of 300 degrees, we realized that the thermometer was only monitoring the air behind it and not the entire cooking surface. Lower-performing grills had row after row of vents that perforated the back of their cookboxes (some even lacked full back panels). The boxes themselves were thin, with lids that closed loosely over the grates. This translated to an inability to retain heat. When we tried a second time, placing meat much closer to the lit burner, the recipe timing and meat tenderness improved, but smoke flavor was still absent from most.

By contrast, our top grill—the only one that gave us smoky, tender meat—has a cookbox with its bottom and sides made of thick cast aluminum and a heavy, double-layered steel lid. The lid seals tightly, and the box has just one narrow vent across the back. Meat cooked properly in a timely manner every time because this fortified construction and minimal venting forced most of the smoke and heat to stay in the box with the food.

In the end, this grill’s competence and versatility, its sturdiness, and its easy cleanup (including the largest, most stable grease tray, which can be lined with a disposable pan) earned it the top spot. The Weber Spirit E-310 is an updated three-burner version of our former favorite. Weber moved the control knobs to the front, freeing up space on the side table, and added a hook that holds the propane tank and shows the fuel level at a glance. This grill is fairly basic, with no side burner (available on model E-320 for about $50 more), but it does the job. For the same price, you may buy a bigger grill with more frills, but you won’t get a better one.