apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

yay! I have been looking for a small grill and both the Eva Solo grills, but am too cheap to get them. The Charcoal Bucket Grill looks good, but I worry it would get too hot for our deck. We used to have a Weber grill, but we got rid of it when we moved, and again, not really wanting to catch the wooden deck on fire.

I have been looking at the Cobb grill, which claims it does not get too hot to touch http://www.cobbq.com/shopexd.asp?id=63


but my neighbor upstairs swears her big green egg is the way to go.

http://www.biggreenegg.com/bge.htm


has anyone tried either of these?

It may be a bit big for a lot of folks, but I can't say enough good about the Weber Spirit E310. It is built extremely solid and is meant to last. The Weber grill manual that comes with it lists most of your grillables with temp settings and times. It has never steered me wrong, even when grilling things for the first time. The 310 has three burners (front, mid, back) which allows you to shut the middle one off and cook indirectly which is a lot like roasting - great for larger cuts of meat.

http://www.weber.com/bbq/pub/grill/2007/gas/SpiritE310.aspx

It is around $400 and worth every penny. I have been known to scrape 6 inches of snow off the top to run it.

We got a Weber BabyQ as a gift last year, and though I am a big charcoal fan we have LOVED it. With the optional stand, it's easy to use as a regular grill. But it's small, perfect for little apartment balconies. Very even heat, heats up very fast, great grill surface that doesn't have big holes, so you don't even need a grill pan to cook asparagus, etc.

I have the little Weber portable gas grill that I bought 3 years ago and it sits on a metal folding table and has served me well since then. It does need a new flame guard/plate as the current one is rusting out but it still serves me well and I use it most times of the year.

I ended up choosing it since I had to climb stairs to get stuff up to my apartment and my balcony isn't all that huge to begin with.

For those looking for something abit bigger and less portable, I have the Bar-B-Chef charcoal grill from BBQGalore. While it's probably one of the priciest charcoal-only grills, (right up there with the Big Green Egg) I love it. Firstly, it's tall enough that I don't have to stoop over it when I'm cooking. There's a ton of space on the 4 cast iron grill grates, and you can raise and lower the charcoal fire to get the temperature you want from the coals, alittle easier than shifting food or coals back and forth.

http://www.bbqgalore.com/charcoal//168415

It's also a grill that grillmaster Steve Raichlen has listed in his top 7 favorite grills:

http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/steve-raichlens-favorite-grills

It's not the most beautiful, but the Meco 4100 series is an affordable (~ $75.00), compact and super-functional workhorse.

We've tried fancier models when we were subletting and while cooking for family and friends, but the Meco 4100 continues to be far and away my household's favorite. It certainly deserves mention here, if only for an awesome feature that's (oddly) difficult to find in other grills: a cooking surface that you can raise and lower.