The 3 Best Flat Top Grills and Griddles of 2024, Tested

Oct 18, 2024

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Our top picks come from Weber, Blackstone, and Traeger.

In This Article

Food & Wine / Russell Kilgore

Cooking outdoors, especially on weeknights or when time is short, need not be limited to gas grills. Griddles, flat tops, planchas, flat grills — whatever you want to call them — are easy to underestimate. I did for a long time. Granted, my first cooking gig in a diner called for producing 90 percent of the menu from two flat top griddles, but I saw them as very breakfast oriented. Yes, they’re excellent choices for cooking large batches of eggs, pancakes, bacon, or French toast, but that’s just a glimpse at their versatility.

Griddles are excellent cooking vessels, as I later learned, for cooking meat, seafood, vegetables, and more. Burgers (meat or plant-based) on a griddle take on a flavor and texture quite different those cooked on a grill — think about the difference between a diner burger or patty melt and a backyard burger.

Gas griddles take a little more upkeep than the average gas grill because they need periodic seasoning to keep them non-stick and free from rust and corrosion, but that fact aside, they’re just as easy to use as a grill and, dare I say it, more versatile than many gas grills. We brought five of the best flat top grills to our outdoor lab to see how they performed in a series of tests.

The Blackstone is extremely easy to use, has good heat control, and is easy to clean.

The setup was a little confusing, and it’s better to set this griddle’s temperature lower than needed and increase it as necessary than try to cool it down.

This Blackstone grill collected perfect scores across the board, making it our Best Overall pick. We should note this griddle runs hotter than expected for the low, medium, and high categories, and it’s best to start at a lower temperature, as the controls are pretty responsive to increases. Dropping the temperature takes some time for the heat to dissipate, which is a positive in disguise: That longer time is a testimony to the Blackstone’s heat retention.

As with many gas grills and griddles, a noticeable lateral strip of higher heat across the middle left the top and bottom of the cooking surface ran cooler than the center. Maintaining the griddle top while cooking was easy, thanks to a rear-mounted grease trap that collected grease and residual scraped-off bits. Besides a bit of fond from the burger patties and cheese, no food stuck to the griddle, which made cleaning it simple in round after round of testing.

Burners: 4 | Cooking Area: 769 square inches, about 30 burgers | Cooktop Material: Rolled steel

The side tables and storage provide generous extra working space, and the grill gave mostly even and consistent results.

The setup took a little over two hours, and while the extra features are nice, they sacrificed a bit of cooking space as a tradeoff.

The Weber Slate is a full cooking station assembly with a three-burner cooktop, an under-shelf with storage bins, two rigid shelves with one fold-up extension, and a drop-down lid to cover the griddle surface when not in use. Considering all the additional features, assembly was an involved task, but once together, the griddle was sturdy and easy to move. The built-in digital thermometer performed as most built-ins do — it wasn’t remarkably accurate but provided a temperature baseline.

Food cooked evenly in all our tests, except on a cooler strip towards the top of the cooktop. Food from that area, two eggs, a couple of bacon strips, and two slices of French toast didn’t brown as well as food cooked on the rest of the grill. As with the Blackstone griddle, the burgers and cheese left a bit of fond to scrape off at the end. All of the eggs clung to the griddle, so lifting them took some patience. We had no issues with the patties sticking, though, and the French toast and bacon also released from the griddle easily. The grill top was easy to clean with a scraper, and a grease collection system efficiently handled the accumulated grease.

Burners: 3 | Cooking Area: 540 square inches, about 22 burgers | Cooktop Material: Carbon steel

The Traeger Flatrock has even heating in the center zones and an excellent grease management system.

It had some unexpected hot zones towards the edges, and the price is comparatively high for what you get.

The Traeger Flatrock comes assembled, so there were no issues there. We seasoned the carbon steel cooktop with four coats of oil and were ready to cook. The u-shaped burners provide mostly even heat across the cooking surface, with unexpected hot zones near the outside edges. The Traeger’s heat retention was good, but when fully loaded on one side with burgers, the temperature dipped a bit. We had no issues with food sticking, and even the fond from the burgers and cheese lifted easily with this griddle.

The Traeger’s grease management system is excellent, with a wide opening for scraping grease and debris without clogging. The side tables are ample, with an offset rail for hanging a grill brush and other tools between the rail and the table rather than on hooks.

Burners: 3 | Cooking Area: 594 square inches, about 24 burgers | Cooktop Material: Carbon steel

All the grills we tested scored highly, but the Blackstone Original Series 36-Inch Griddle is the only model that earned perfect scores. The Blackstone had an excellent balance of quality, consistency, and price that made it stand out from the rest.

We ran griddles through a series of tests, performing common tasks that the typical griddle owner would. Through these tests, we considered design, ease of use, and cooking performance.

Food & Wine / Russell Kilgore

More burners give you more control in creating multiple heat zones. Be cautious of too many burners in a small cooking area, as there can be “bleed-over” heat transferred from a burner to adjacent sections. A wider surface area, say, 36 inches, is fine for three or four individual burners, as the space between burners is wider, resulting in less encroachment from neighboring burners.

Food & Wine / Russell Kilgore

The best cooktop materials are rust-resistant and non-stick. Some non-stick coatings and high temperatures don’t play well together, so a well-seasoned carbon steel or rolled steel cooktop is your best choice for getting non-stick results. Those two metals also retain and evenly distribute heat, which are key factors in evenly cooking food and keeping your cooktop hot for multiple cooking rounds. With high-quality cooktops such as these, keep in mind that it’s better to undershoot your cooking temperature, as you can increase the heat quickly, but they retain heat so well that cooling them down from too high a temperature takes longer than expected.

Food & Wine / Russell Kilgore

Depending on your preferences, you can choose from a spartan griddle on a stand, or a full cooking station with side tables and storage compartments. Some models feature built-in thermometers and digital temperature controls, if that appeals to you.

Food & Wine / Russell Kilgore

I think most of us prefer low-maintenance in most areas of life. Our top-rated griddles shared common traits that keep cleanup to a minimum. First is they were all easy to season, and that’s an unavoidable task in keeping your cooktop non-stick and free of rust. Secondly, they were all easy to scrape, removing pooled grease, errant bits of cheese, and the seared meat buildup know as fond. Third is what to do with that material after scraping it up. Our top models had easily-accessible grease management systems, both for removing the material from the cooktop and emptying them as part of cleanup after the cooking is done.

Food & Wine / Russell Kilgore

Most manufacturers recommend simply scraping the cooktop clean and adding a light coat of oil. But what about stuck-on food? It’s not that different than cleaning a grill. The first option is pouring a small amount of water over the spot to loosen the stuck food with the power of steam. Only use a small amount, on a cooled griddle, as pouring large amounts of water on a hot cooktop can warp it.

A safer solution is to use some coarse salt as a scrubbing agent to remove any stains or stuck on food. Follow up all cleaning with a light coating of high smoke temperature oil. You can clean the griddle’s body with a mild soapy water solution, avoiding abrasive scrubbers or cleaners. Finally, empty and clean the grease collection system per the manufacturer’s instructions.

The two cooking methods are quite different, even though you can prepare many foods on either. Think of a griddle as a really big skillet. You can sear meat on it, saute, cook eggs, pancakes, fish, or toast bread, to name a few. A grill has gaps in the grates to expose food to flame for direct heat and flavor, so cooking food that might fall through the cracks isn’t a great idea — I can’t think of anyone ever cooking pancakes on a grill. Another thing to think about is what you want from your food in the end. A grilled burger taste great and has a distinct texture. But you can’t make a thin, crisp-edged smash burger-style patty on grill grates without risking pressing the meat through them. Story short, if you’d cook a food in a pan, use a griddle.

You can definitely use a griddle to extend your cooking area and use pots and pans on them. But keep in mind that you have less control over the heat conductivity between the griddle and pot and you would over a stovetop burner, so over or under heating the pots is a common issue.

Weber 28-Inch 3-Burner Liquid Propane Griddle ($449 at Amazon)This griddle from Weber was also rated highly with a 4.5 score, so it’s not a bad option at all. We found it had too many burners for its small size, however, and that sometimes made the temperature run away, giving us some hard-seared French toast and stuck-on eggs. This model may perform better when cooking at a single temperature at a time than when cooking in multiple heat zones.

LoCo Cookers 36-Inch 3-Burner Digital Series II SmartTemp Griddle ($700 at Home Depot)The LoCo is a good griddle, considering it scored 4.8 out of 5. We had issues with the assembly process, which was, at times, confusing and overall time-consuming. This griddle had some noticeable hot spots, despite its temperature settings on the dial and burners that shifted on and off to maintain temperature.

Food & Wine / Russell Kilgore

Greg Baker is a six-time James Beard Award nominee who spent 36 years working as a chef, including as owner of Fodder & Shine and The Refinery in Tampa, Florida. He retired from professional cooking in 2019 and has been a frequent Food & Wine contributor since.