Grilling and camping are two things that go together hand in hand. If you want hot food it’s just about the only way to get it, and certainly by far the best in my opinion. The type and quality of your grill can make or break a camping experience, making the difference between a mediocre meal and a memorable one for you and your family and friends, or even other people around the campsite; good food is made to be shared after all.

I made this guide to help narrow down the search for a great grill a bit, by giving you a list of some of the most popular I can find to kick off your search, along with a list of “do’s and don’t’s” for picking a grill, helping you to know what to look for and make your own judgments.

This is an excellent modular stove you can set up at the campsite of your choice. Fully mechanical with no worry of running out of electricity, this runs on pretty much any size propane tank and provides 2 high quality burners for you to use.

The stove top is wide and spacious in every direction, giving you plenty of room to do what you will with it. It can hold up to two large pots (great for stews or skillet meals), but is also designed so a? griddle top can be added and used to cook all sorts of things.

It has great wind protection, a very comfortable working height, and is overall easy and comfortable to use.

The main drawback is that it’s a bit hard to transport; it’s heavy and needs to be disassembled. It also doesn’t work as a traditional grill in any capacity as there is no safe way to funnel the grease the way the burners are set up.

Still it’s good and quite inexpensive, so makes a perfect accompaniment to your camping experience, especially for long trips where you need something that can work as a regular stove so you don’t get tired of grilled foods.

This is an absolutely tiny gas grill designed to be used on any tabletop outdoors. It has high, stable legs to prevent the grill from scorching the surface you use it on, and keeps it level and usable on anything, even uneven grassy ground. The legs also fold away for easy storage and transport, with a nice and convenient briefcase style handle on the top of the safety locking lid.

It provides 5500 BTU on one burner, unfortunately a bit low even for its fairly small 145 square inches of cooking space; this mean the grill will cook your meals quite slowly and may end up making some food (particularly vegetables like asparagus) soggy by the end of cooking.

This grill isn’t particularly bad, but I feel unfortunately overpriced for what it offers; I’d much prefer either the Smokey Joe Weber or the Blackstone Griddle, both of which are far cheaper than this gas grill, and I feel perform significantly better for the price asked.

Another in the Coleman Roadtrip series, and another pretty solid grill. There’s a total of 3 of these here and they’re all solid. This one is the second best of the bunch by my estimate. It has great burners, the same convenient rolling design as the other 2, a comfortable height for cooking with and everything else that makes the others good choices.

The wheels roll well on most terrain and it’s easy to start up and use, getting to a high temperature quickly and easily, with two independently adjustable burners. The side shelves sliding into the grill is a great touch.

Interchangeable cooktops like the others is great, and the only real gripe I have is the handle is a bit awkward compared to our winner. If you’re looking for a cheap alternative to the RoadTrip LXE above this is an excellent choice.

This is a nice little tabletop griddle for camping. While it doesn’t come with its own stand (and doesn’t do too well just sitting on the ground due to the little feet it has) it’s lightweight, easily portable, and performs excellently. It uses a single H shaped 12, 000 BTU burner to great effect, providing even and quite good heating to its 260 square inches of cooking space.

While? not great as an actual grill, if I had to choose between a grill that is only a grill or a griddle that is only a griddle while camping, I’ll take the latter every time (ones that do both are obviously better than either). You can cook pretty much anything on a griddle, where dedicated grills are a lot more limited.

It doesn’t have a bad price either, being about a quarter of what our winner will run you, and takes up considerably less space. I especially like the easy ignition and adjustability.

If I had to level one complaint at it it’s the basic construction. It’s quite rough and liable to get snagged on things in storage, and the top not actually attaching to the frame when in storage doesn’t help matters for it being a bit of a pain to move sometimes.

A lesser version of our winner is still pretty darn good. It has a lot of the same stats, actually. 20, 000 BTUs across 3 burners is great and evenly distributed heat (especially with the nice oval shaped burners). The cooktop is still a nice ceramic, which channels heat well and cools down fairly quickly,? and the top snaps tightly over it. One start ignition and three easy to use knobs make turning the grill on and adjusting heat quite easy.

Where this unit stumbles is the way it folds up. The wheels are significantly worse (a little stickier, a little less traction) and the handle is likewise inferior, and is less steady on even slightly inclined ground. Mind you this is a relatively minor drawback for what is a close to $100 drop in price, making this an excellent budget version of our winning grill.

Weber is a top notch brand for grills and smokers; one of my personal favorites in fact. This simple grill represents that quality well, though it’s not much to look at. It’s the style of kettle grill designed to be used with charcoal or wood that you can find pretty much anywhere, and its strength primarily lies in the quality of its materials and construction.

This 14 inch diameter package (roughly) provides around 205 square inches of grilling space, plenty for most small outings (it makes about 5 burgers at a time). All of the materials are top notch, with a ceramic coating over the solid steel construction providing extra insulation and a glossy finish which should not peel or chip over time.

The tripod is steady without adding over much to the weight (it comes in at a total of 9.5 lbs) and the grease drip is perfectly situated and easy to remove and clean when necessary.

Throw in good dampers, a great handle, and a super low price and you have yourself a real winner.

This is an incredibly cheap and simple grill, but it’s certainly appealing as a portable cooking device. Costing a bit less than a sixth of our winning grill, it’s an incredible budget option for those who just want a quick and dirty option.

While billed as a stove, it works equally well as a propane grill with the addition of a cheap and simple grate. It has two burners, with a total 20, 000 BTUs of heat, plenty enough to quickly, thoroughly, and evenly cook pretty much anything around.

This is a stove with a wind shield and has very good ventilation, so you don’t need to worry about a nasty gas flavor to your food.?

It’s not the best unit on the market, but you get what you pay for, and I don’t have very many actual gripes about the product, save the chrome plating on the grate; it adds little and will likely flake off quickly.

This grill is a mixed bag. I like this type of grill quite a lot, and Weber makes very good examples of it with this similar design. This one though…it’s just a little too meh at everything to truly recommend. It has a decent size (189 square inches), but it’s not great.

It has a good design, but is a little too small to really take advantage of it. It’s easy to move, because it’s made of relatively poor but lightweight materials. Its heat is just a little bit below what I’d want for a 189 square inch grill, and so on and so on.

It wouldn’t be so bad if this grill was about half the price, but it’s hard to justify a thoroughly mediocre grill that shares a similar price bracket with the Coleman Road Trip 285, which is a contender for second best grill on this list. Much like everything else about the grill, the price is just a little too off to truly recommend it.

I want to like this grill. It looks nice and has quite a lot going for it by appearances. It’s easy to ignite with the twist of a knob and to adjust temperature with the others. It has excellent heat retention and quite spacious folding side tables, with a great lid and it’s easy to open with the heat resistant handle.

The sturdy stainless steel construction makes it great at retaining heat and very durable for the long haul; this is clearly designed to be a camp grill you keep with you for years or even a lifetime.

Unfortunately the interior is where it falls apart a bit. The grills has an amazing amount of space for a camp grill; 345 square inches, as large as a full sized grill (even larger than some) with superior grates to most we’ve seen (porcelain coated for non-stick and easy cleaning). The burners, however, are far, far too weak for the size. You’re getting little over 30 BTUs per square inch, about half of what is the minimum I’d recommend. As a result, despite the excellent construction, it’s impossible to recommend this grill.

We have a complete list of stainless steel grills here.

This is a great grill that comes with everything we just talked about wanting in a camping grill. It’s lightweight and easily portable, while coming with its own built-in table (probably my favorite feature). In its folded up from it can be rolled around a lot like a wheeled suitcase, making it very easy to haul wherever you need it to.

The table is relatively spacious as is the grill top for a portable grill, and is capable of swapping out the grill top for a stove or range flat top, making it very versatile.

Its easy to clean, durable ceramic and steel construction makes it the perfect rugged cooking device for taking to remote campsites and dragging up and down hills and over rocks and what have you. All in all an excellent camping grill and for a surprisingly reasonable price.

Camping grills are kind of a mixed bag. They fall into 2 main categories: true grills and stoves (with griddle and grilling options). Of the true grills, the Camp Chef Explorer Double Burner Stove and Weber Smokey Joe stand out as the best, depending on what you want. Of the stoves, I really like the Blackstone Tabletop griddle and Cuisinart models the best; the former is excellent for short trips and use at home, while the latter is great for people who basically live from campground to campground.

These 4 to 5 models are the best on the list for the most part, and are largely what I would stick to.

How To Pick The Best Portable Camping Grills

Choosing the best RV grill, or boat grill, or camping grill is surprisingly simple, and a camping grill only slightly more complex than small gas grills that you use in your counter, balconies and patios. The things you look for in any grill is how hot it gets and how evenly it cooks first and foremost, with its durability a close second.

A camp grill adds the necessity of it being portable, relatively inexpensive, and versatile (the best camping grill won’t JUST be a grill). As with any product, you also want to look for a good warranty.

Heat

A good grill should have a high BTU (British Thermal Units) output. Roughly you’re looking at somewhere between 60 and 100 BTU per square inch of the grill. So a 300 square inch grill needs to have at least 18, 000 BTU.

Heat isn’t everything, and how EVENLY it heats the cooking surface is also important. It is also, obviously, possible to have overkill. Beware of grills that boast a BTU grossly out of these guidelines as it can easily burn or dry out whatever you try to cook on it. Having too high of a BTU is a huge drawback packaged as an advantage, and probably implies other quality control issues since the heat regulation is obviously borked.

Construction

Steel is a particularly good material to construct the grill out of, being the perfect confluence of lightweight, durable, and having a relatively low conductivity. Aluminum is definitely lightweight, and cheap, but conducts heat a bit too well so it has issues with keeping the grill warm.

While steel is good for the cooktop, ceramic tends to be better, heating up evenly and retaining heat well while cooling off quickly once the grill is turned off.

Versatility

A grill that is just a grill is fine for home use, but you want something that can do a little more for camping, especially if you’re camping for more than just a weekend and looking forward to stay in your camping tent or canopy tent.

A rangetop is pretty much a necessity for these kinds of grills, making it possible to cook a huge variety more of foods. It makes it possible to cook eggs, easier to cook fish and similar foods that have a tendency to fall apart or lose most of their moisture on a grill.

It’s also nice just to have multiple burners so you can cook one thing on one side and something different on the other.

Warranty

With any grill (or other appliance for that matter) a warranty is important. This goes double for anything you plan to travel around with, especially to backwoods campsites and other places where any number of things could happen to your grill. Being able to get it repaired or replaced is a godsend if some disaster happens.

Power Source

Propane is preferred here. Wood can sometimes be hard to come by that’s fit for cooking and electricity is out for the most part, but propane works perfectly for a camping or boat grill. As a a corollary to that, you want to be sure it ignites easily, with a single button press preferably. Fiddling with pilot lights is never fun, especially when you’re out in the middle of nowhere.

We got you more camping cooking tools here.