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. Check the grease trap after every use (or before every use), and don’t let it get too full.
The grill has 529 square inches of cooking space across its enameled cast iron cooking grates, providing plenty of room for all your burgers, steaks, and veggies—we found it ample enough for a family of five. The Weber Spirit II E-310 provides the unrivaled combination of top-notch grilling performance, a versatile three-burner design, durability, and a relatively affordable price. It excelled at every test, producing the best sear on our burgers of any grill, and equaling or outdoing the others in our tests involving barbecue chicken and whole roasted chickens.
A cover will protect your grill from getting stained by rain and rusting. As Head of eCommerce, Alex makes sure our readers find the right information to help them make the best purchase. After graduating from Cambridge University, Alex got his start in reviewing at the iconic Good Housekeeping Institute, testing a wide range of household products and appliances. He then moved to BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine, assessing gardening tools, machinery, and wildlife products. Helping people find true quality and genuine value is a real passion. The instructions are simple, and would’ve been improved with a little text, but they were effective.
With the Genesis II E-310, we didn’t notice a significant upgrade in performance over that of the Spirit II E-310. In fact, the Genesis II E-310 didn’t sear our burgers as darkly as the Spirit II E-310 did. As for maintenance, the Spirit E-310’s flat grates were easy to keep clean with a grill brush, and its grease trap was easy to access for dumping and washing.
This grill is a splurge, but it receives praise and rave reviews thanks to its functionality, high-quality construction, and superior grilling abilities. If you’re serious about grilling, you seriously need to purchase the Summit S Burner Gas Grill. If you’re weber portable grill looking for a well-built gas grill to sizzle your steaks and serve up perfectly charred hamburgers, the Weber Spirit II E-310 is our top pick for a gas grill. I would recommend it to friends or family in the market for a grill as the best grill you can get.
Once your grill has a rusty hole in the firebox, it’s destined for the scrap heap. That said, the Weber Spirit II E-210 excels at its primary function—straight-up grilling. This little two-burner grill puts a mean sear on steaks, chops, and burgers. It has good heat control and can maintain a steady medium to medium-low for grilling chicken pieces with rendered skin and sticky glaze.
A good gas grill should last a decade or more, provided you clean it after every use and protect it from the elements. Weber, which makes all three of the grills we recommend, guarantees all parts on its Spirit II series for 10 years. So we expect our top and budget picks to hold up for at least that long.
A small barbecue such as the portable charcoal barbecue from the Smokey Joe series is the perfect size for any beginner. Small enough to be easily controlled, but still large enough to cook several things at once, this small design is also easy to clean and store. The porcelain coating prevents food from sticking, so the grates don’t need seasoning. Only very old models of Weber grills would require seasoning, and because they are very old, that surely happened a long time ago. If you purchase a new Weber grill, you don’t need to worry about seasoning it.
If you own a grill, you’ll have to perform these tasks at least a few times a year, so a grill that makes them a little easier is a welcome thing. Finally, we restricted our search to grills that burn propane from refillable tanks, the most common fuel by far. But you should note that there are versions of all of our picks that work with natural gas. Just keep in mind that if you don’t already have the proper hookups, installing a natural-gas outlet isn’t cheap or simple.