Char Chimney

Reviews & Comparisons

One product at a time, or two side by side. The pages for the moment you've narrowed it down and want somebody to tell you honestly whether it's the right gift.

A roundup answers “which of these six?”. These pages answer the two questions that come after it: “is this specific thing any good?” and “this one or that one?”. They are the last stop before you spend, so they are written to talk you out of a purchase as readily as into one.

What a review here is, and what it is not

It is not a test. We do not own these products, we have not cooked with them, and we will never tell you we have. What we do instead is read the published specification and the listing carefully, look at what the design can and cannot physically do, and judge the thing as a gift — who it delights, who quietly leaves it in a drawer, and what it costs beyond the purchase price in effort or upkeep. The whole method is set out on how we pick, including why you will never see a star rating or a score out of ten here.

Every review carries a “skip it if” list as well as a “give it if” list. That is a structural rule rather than an editorial preference: a review page with no honest reason to walk away is an advertisement, and this site is built so that one cannot be published.

Start with the comparison, not the review

If you already know roughly what you want, a head-to-head is usually the faster read. Most grilling gift decisions come down to a fork in the road rather than a shortlist: a pocket thermometer or a wireless one, a charcoal grill or a flat-top griddle, four good tools or twenty-six cheaper ones, neoprene gloves or silicone, or a pellet tube or a smoker box. Each one lays the two options side by side in a table, then says plainly which recipient each suits.

The single-product reviews

The six long reviews cover the products people research hardest before spending: the Weber kettle and the Blackstone griddle at the big-ticket end, the MEATER Plusin the middle, and the everyday three — a starter tool set, a pair of heat gloves, and the chimney starter this site is named after.

They deliberately span the price range rather than clustering at the expensive end. The most useful thing we can tell most buyers is that the cheap pick is the right one — a fifteen-dollar thermometer improves a beginner’s food more than a two-hundred-dollar anything, and saying so is the point of publishing reviews at all.

How prices work on these pages

Every price you see is fetched live and stamped with the date it was read. We never store a price in the page text, because a stored price is a price that goes stale and misleads you. If a live price is unavailable, the button says “check price” instead of guessing.

When you are ready to shop the wider category rather than one product, the gear guides compare every option we recommend, the budget guides sort the same products by what you want to spend, and the how-to guides explain the cooking these tools are for.

Everything in Reviews

Elsewhere on Char Chimney