Overall, this is a good basic barrel grill, but assembly was frustrating and it lacks many of the features that made the Classic our pick for best upgrade. The true original Weber grill, the Weber Original weber genesis 2 Kettle Grill, can be purchased for under $100, making it our top pick for best budget grill. This grill measures 18 inches wide, which is a noticeable surface-area difference from the 22-inch grill.
A front door allows easy access to the charcoal during cooking and the double-lined hood is a nice feature to help hold in heat. The Professional Cart Grill has an interesting rotisserie design, too, that uses a special charcoal basket across the back for a dedicated rotisserie fire. We were underwhelmed with the performance of the Napoleon weber charcoal grill 22-inch grill, which is most likely a result of the grill needing more briquettes to really work well. The kettle on this model is pretty deep and you can adjust the cooking grate to two different levels. We wouldn’t advise cooking with the grate at the highest level if you’re looking for a nice sear since it’s too far off the heat.
Before the cooking tests, we spent a day assembling the three grills. Overall, the cooking tests were far more important to us; you typically only assemble a grill once. But poor instructions can make assembly slow, frustrating, and full of retraced steps. And a simply bad design can make assembly needlessly difficult. Plus, poorly finished parts can have dangerously sharp edges—sometimes sharp enough to cause a nasty cut.
For the indirect-cooking test, we cooked a whole chicken at as close to 500 °F as we could get (emulating Barbara Kafka’s famous oven-roasting method). We moved the remaining coals to one side of the coal grate and portable bbq added half a chimney’s worth of freshly lit coals. In effect we were testing whether the grills could function as ovens—a really nice feature in the hot summer months, when you may not want to warm up your kitchen.
That’s just one of the questions I’ll answer in this review of the OG of Weber grills. If you’ve ever found starting a grill to be a hassle, and even if you haven’t, this will make grilling so much easier. Is there a portable grill that works as well as a full-sized one? Meet the Kudu Open-Fire Grill, which allows for all the romance of this kind of cooking, with none of the hassle. All products featured on Epicurious are independently selected by our editors.