The Best Indoor Grills of 2023

If you’re dead set on an open grill, our first choice is the Hamilton Beach Searing Grill with Lid Window, which is big enough to cook six hamburgers at a time. Burgers, chicken, and fish came out with deep grill marks closely resembling the ones you get from your outdoor grill.

The lid doesn’t press down on food, but rather it helps to hold in heat to speed up cooking a little and also contain smoke and cooking odors. The grill grate and the drip pan are dishwasher safe and the lid comes off for hand washing.

The Breville the Perfect Press is small, beautiful, and with no temperature control settings, uncomplicated to operate. Although it’s primarily intended for panini, it can easily handle three burgers or chicken breasts.

The plates have a flat surface so you don’t get any grill marks and you can’t remove them for cleaning. While not being able to rinse them under running water may bother you if you’re a cleaning fanatic, they wipe clean easily, and removing and reinstalling the plates is one less thing to worry about.

But my biggest gripe is with Breville’s "crush control" feature, which is supposed to prevent you from pressing down too hard on sandwiches, but it couldn’t adjust to evenly rest on a thick panini and as a result, the paninis I made didn’t come out evenly browned. As the plates lock together, the unit can stand up vertically when it’s not being used and there’s cord storage in the bottom which makes this product handy to store.

While you’ll ultimately get beautiful results from this grill, you do have to flip foods over and have a little patience. In our tests, it took 10 minutes to cook six burgers and 20 minutes to grill salmon. That may not sound long, but it’s more than twice the time most of the closed grills needed.

Even though it doesn’t have a lid, we didn’t notice much smoking during grilling. The Zojirushi model is large and will take up quite a bit of space on the countertop, in the dishwasher, and in a cabinet or closet if you’re going to stash it away between uses.

Like the Griddler Deluxe, the Cuisinart Griddle Five is handsome and versatile. It too can be used in an open or closed position and has both grill and griddle surfaces. Smaller than the Deluxe, it can only hold four patties at once when closed or eight when open. We found it really excelled when it came to chicken and salmon, which came out looking bronzed.

This grill has an LCD screen that shows the temperature control choices, lighted bars to show you the progress of preheating, and a timer that can count down or count up. However, the functions on the display are controlled by turning and pressing a knob with enough options to lead to some confusion. The drip pan slides into the grill but it took us a little bit of experimentation to figure out how to position it.

What holds us back from recommending this model wholeheartedly is that at higher temperatures and longer cooking times, the edges of its handle get quite hot. Although it wasn’t hot enough to burn us, it was a cause for some concern.

This product is solidly built and cooks evenly. It’s also large, heavy, and very pricey, yet it will only cook six burgers at once. As claimed, it didn’t smoke, but then neither did the open Zojirushi.

It has only two settings, high and warm, which make it easy to use but also makes it seem like you’re not getting much for your money. Although you do get a recipe book, the use and care leaflet are skimpy on details. You can clean the grate and drip pan in the dishwasher.

On the Black and Decker 3-in-1 Grill Griddle and Waffle Maker, you get cooking plates that can be reversed from a flat side to a waffle side so it really is like getting two appliances in one. It does a nice job of browning burgers and grilling cheese sandwiches, but we didn’t test it with chicken and fish because the small handle becomes too hot to touch after cooking.

With the Black and Decker, you don’t get a drip pan and have to put a small bowl underneath the drip spout at one corner to prevent a messy countertop. Dishwasher cleaning isn’t recommended. On the upside, Black and Decker hardware can be found almost everywhere, so there's a good chance that, should you prefer to shop in local stores over online outlets, you'll be able to pick one up without too much trouble.