Serious Eats named the Smart Grill her splurge pick after testing eight smokeless grills, and the reason is that it is two appliances. It opens flat into a 260 square inch grill and closes into a panini press, and she rated it equally good at kebabs and at sandwiches. Its 1800W elements sit inside the plates, and sensors catch the temperature drop when a cold steak lands. It is also 19 pounds, needs a second plate bought separately to grill both faces, and costs several times what the winners cost.
Full review
The Grill That Is Also a Press
Every other machine on this page picks a side. Open grills give you an unobstructed surface and outdoor-style marks; contact grills cook both faces at once and make sandwiches. The Breville BGR820XL does both, and that duality is why Serious Eats' Taylor Murray made it her splurge pick out of eight smokeless grills tested for a review updated in February 2026. "Unlike any of the others in my testing, this grill can be operated as an open or contact (read: panini press) grill," she wrote. "I love appliances that can pull double duty, and this indoor grill was equally excellent at grilling kebabs as it was making a panini."
That flexibility answers a criticism levelled at this whole category by a different test kitchen. Reviewed, having tested nine indoor grills, declined to name any open grill as a top pick, reasoning that "open grills didn't give us much better results than a closed grill and they can't be used to make a pressed sandwich." The Breville is the machine that does not have to choose. Opened flat, it presents 260 square inches — several times the surface of the compact open grills here.
Elements Inside the Plates
The engineering difference that Breville leads with is where the heat comes from. Its own description is precise: "With 1800W heating elements embedded into the plates, not underneath them, and an electronic thermostat to quickly sense and control, this grill cooks and sears steaks with consistent high heat." Most electric grills mount an element below a plate and heat the food through an intermediate layer. Putting the element in the plate removes a step and a lag.
Murray found the practical consequence in the marks and the flavour: "The grill grates are raised enough to produce nice, brown grill marks with an excellent flavor." Ridge height is doing work here as much as wattage — deep ridges concentrate contact pressure into narrow lines, which is what makes a mark rather than a general browning. Combined with 1800 watts arriving directly, this is the most heat, delivered most directly, of anything discussed here.
Sensors That Catch the Cold-Steak Drop
The "smart" in the name refers to two mechanisms, and Murray verified both. The first is thermal recovery: the grill has "special sensors that can detect a sudden drop in temperature (like when you place a cold steak on it) and adjust rapidly to bring it back to where you want." This is the specific failure mode that ruins searing on underpowered indoor grills — the plate is at temperature, refrigerated meat lands on it, the surface crashes, and instead of a crust you get grey meat weeping liquid. Sensing that crash and driving the element back up is exactly the right intervention.
The second is grease management, and it is more interesting than a drip tray. Murray describes "the ability to tilt the plate to whisk away oil and fats" — the cooking surface physically angles so rendered fat runs off rather than pooling. That matters directly for smoke: her central finding across all eight grills was that "a lot of smoke comes from burning fat" and that getting fat off the heating element fast is what actually reduces it. An LCD display handles the interface, telling you when the plates are preheated and counting down the cook time — which puts it ahead of the Ninja Sizzle GR101, whose seven-minute preheat has no completion signal at all.
The Drain Hole Is Too Small
The tilt system works better in principle than in execution, and Murray said so while explaining how the field as a whole handled grease. Comparing designs, she wrote that the Breville "had a tilted grill plate that allowed the grease to drip away from the hot plate to prevent burning and smoking, but the hole was a bit small."
Her verdict on which approach won is worth stating plainly, because it does not favour the expensive machine. The grills that reduced smoke best in her testing were the ones with the simplest solution: "Other grills, like the winning Zojirushi Indoor Electric Grill and Hamilton Beach Electric Indoor Searing Grill, had lots of holes located between the grills' ridges, so oil and fat were whisked away the moment they started to pool." Perforated grate beat engineered tilt. So while the Breville is the most sophisticated appliance here, it is not the least smoky one, and the two grills that outranked it cost a fraction as much.
One Grill Plate, One Griddle Plate
There is a purchasing gotcha that should be understood before ordering. The Smart Grill ships with two plates — one ribbed grill plate and one flat griddle plate — which is sensible for a machine meant to do both. But if you want to grill on the top and bottom simultaneously, which is the whole point of a contact grill, you need two ribbed plates. Murray flagged it directly: "If you want to grill on both parts of the grill (top and bottom), you have to order a separate grill plate from the manufacturer, since one comes as a griddle."
On an appliance already at the top of the price range, an additional accessory purchase to unlock the headline capability is a genuine irritation. It is not a defect and the shipped configuration is defensible — a grill plate below and a flat plate above is exactly right for a panini — but anyone buying this specifically to press marks into both faces of a steak should budget for the extra plate.
Nineteen Pounds and a 14-Inch Footprint
This is a substantial object. Breville puts it at 19.44 pounds and 14 by 16.7 by 5 inches, and Serious Eats' practical complaint is about exactly that: "It's fairly heavy to pull in and out of the cabinet on a regular basis." For comparison within her own test group, the Zojirushi is 7.7 pounds and the Hamilton Beach is eight. Breville does mitigate the storage problem — the plates lock together and the unit stands vertically, and Serious Eats noted that "even though it is on the larger side, the grill can be stored horizontally to save space."
The honest planning assumption is that this appliance lives on the counter. Anything you have to brace yourself to lift twice a week will end up used less than it should be. That is a real argument for one of the eight-pound grills if your kitchen has no permanent slot for a 14-inch square machine — and an argument for the Breville if it does, since a grill you leave out is a grill you use.
The Dial and the Price
The remaining two complaints go together. On the interface: "The temperature dial is a bit more complicated than some of the other models and might not be ideal for someone who would prefer a dead-simple experience." That is a fair characterisation of a machine with mode selection, height adjustment, plate tilt and a countdown display, versus a Hamilton Beach that has one rotary knob and a light. Murray's broader finding across the test cuts against complexity: "my favorite grills were the ones that were simple and intuitive to operate."
And on cost: "Oh, and like I said, it's pretty expensive for an indoor grill." She still recommended it, framing the price as "on the upper end of what I would consider a reasonable price for an appliance like this, but it comes with a lot of great features." That is an accurate summary of the trade. This grill does more than anything else here, does it well, and charges for it. Cleaning is at least easy — the plates and drip tray are dishwasher safe and the nonstick is PFOA-free.
Worth It Only If You Use All of It
The Smart Grill makes sense for a household that will genuinely rotate through all three modes: grilling steaks and kebabs open, griddling eggs and pancakes flat, and pressing sandwiches closed. Do all three regularly and it replaces two or three appliances, and the 260 square inch open surface cooks for a family rather than a couple. It is also the right pick if you want thermal recovery that survives putting cold food down, which is where cheaper grills visibly struggle.
It is poor value for anyone who only grills. Serious Eats' own top two picks in the same test were both open grills costing a fraction as much, and one of them beat this on the specific measure of smoke reduction. It is also the wrong machine if you want to stow it between uses, or if you want to turn one knob and cook. Buy it as a permanent, multi-purpose fixture, or buy something lighter.
What Breville Will and Will Not Tell You About the Heat
One specification is worth being careful with. Breville's own product page never states a temperature range for the Smart Grill — the degree symbol does not appear on it at all. What the company describes instead is PID temperature control with named settings, Low through Sandwich to Sear, and an LCD that reports the temperature and heat setting rather than a dial you set to a number. The 200°F to 450°F range often quoted for this grill comes from Serious Eats' key-specs block, recorded during testing, not from Breville.
That distinction matters for the same reason it matters on an induction burner: a named setting is a behaviour, a number is a claim. PID control is genuinely the more sophisticated approach — it is the same closed-loop scheme that lets the grill sense a cold steak landing and drive power back up, rather than simply switching an element on and off around a set point. But if you are shopping on a spec sheet and comparing a stated 450°F on one grill against a stated 450°F on another, understand that Breville is not making that claim here and the figure is a tester's observation.
Strengths
- +The only grill in Serious Eats' eight-model test that works as both an open grill and a contact panini press, and she found it equally good at both
- +1800W elements are embedded inside the plates rather than mounted underneath them, so heat reaches the food more directly
- +Sensors detect the temperature drop when cold food lands and drive the element back up, which Serious Eats confirmed in use
- +Adjustable plate tilt routes grease away from the hot surface before it can burn and smoke
- +Opens flat to a 260 square inch cooking surface — by far the largest here — and stores horizontally to save space
- +Removable plates and drip tray are dishwasher safe and the nonstick is PFOA-free
Watch-outs
- −By a wide margin the most expensive grill on this page; Serious Eats called it "pretty expensive for an indoor grill"
- −At 19.44 pounds it is more than twice the weight of the Zojirushi or Hamilton Beach, and Serious Eats found it "fairly heavy to pull in and out of the cabinet on a regular basis"
- −Ships with one grill plate and one griddle plate — grilling on both faces at once means buying a second grill plate from Breville
- −Serious Eats found the grease drain hole "a bit small" despite the tilt mechanism working well
- −The temperature dial is more complicated than the rotary controls on simpler grills and is not ideal for anyone who wants a dead-simple appliance
- −A 14 by 14 inch footprint takes real counter space even before the lid opens
- −Breville does not publish a numeric temperature range for it at all — the control is described only as PID with Low, Sandwich and Sear settings, so the 200–450°F figure comes from Serious Eats' testing rather than the manufacturer
How it compares
This is the only grill here that answers the objection Reviewed raised against open grills as a class — that they cannot press a sandwich — because it does both. Opening flat to 260 square inches, it dwarfs the Zojirushi EB-CC15 Indoor Electric Grill and the Hamilton Beach Searing Grill with Lid Window 25361, and its plate-tilt grease routing is more sophisticated than either, though Serious Eats judged their perforated grates more effective at cutting smoke. The Ninja Sizzle Smokeless Indoor Grill & Griddle GR101 and Ninja Foodi 5-in-1 Indoor Grill AG301 are the lighter, cheaper alternatives.
Rating sources
Our 4.2 score is the average of these published ratings. Ratings marked * were derived from the reviewer’s written analysis or video transcript — the publisher didn’t print an explicit numeric score, so we inferred one from their own words. Click through to verify. More about methodology.
