Cuisinart Four Burner Dual Fuel Gas Grill review: perfectly capable, for the price

There’s nothing like a good cookout, and the experience is all the better with a great gas barbecue grill that makes the cooking as easy as possible. You can’t enjoy company if you’re constantly fiddling with the grill to maintain temperature, struggling to keep food together with a grate that everything sticks to, simultaneously burning and undercooking items with too little control over the heat, or constantly juggling foods because there’s not enough room to cook it all.

The Cuisinart Four Burner Dual Fuel Gas Grill aims to solve these problems. It provides plenty of cooking space, powerful heating from four primary burners and a side stove burner, nuanced control and some handy features for making your grill work easier from beginning to end.

While it’s not a perfect grill, it delivers a strong enough performance and packs in some extra useful features that help it stand above some of the cheaper options. Learn more about how we test and read on to find out why the Cuisinart Four Burner Dual Fuel Gas Grill is a solid if unspectacular choice.

Cuisinart Four Burner Dual Fuel Gas Grill review: price and availability

In recent years, Cuisinart has taken its long-established reputation for well-respected home cooking appliances outside the kitchen, offering high-quality outdoor grills at good value. 

The Cuisinart Four Burner Dual Fuel Gas Grill upholds the reputation. The grill, priced at $347, is exclusive to Walmart in the US and is not available in the UK or Australia. 

Cuisinart Four Burner Dual Fuel Gas Grill review: design and features

The Cuisinart Four Burner Dual Fuel Gas Grill may be a mouthful of a name, but it’s built to help you get a mouthful of perfectly cooked food. Like its sizable name, this is a sizable grill, and that means it’s pretty heavy. Most of the weight comes from the main portion of the grill where the cooking happens, while the cabinet base and sides contribute just a bit. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of assembly required, and the weight slows down that process. 

Construction took me nearly two hours working alone, and not all of the assembly was intuitive. There are a lot of bolts and screws, some pre-installed that had to be removed and reinstalled to make connections, others needing to be screwed in but kept loose until the finish. Many of these were a nuisance to reach. But it’s incredibly important to follow the instruction to wait until the end to tighten everything down. Even doing so, it can be a struggle to get everything to fit together just right, so failing to do so could potentially result in a less-than-ideal assembly.

Once constructed, the grill puts on a good show. It’s got an elegant look, especially with the triangular, porcelain-coated cast iron grates just waiting to make those perfect grill lines. The mixing and matching of dark and bright metals is tastefully done. There’s a solid 606 square inches of cooking space inside the grill, and a stainless steel warming rack is built above the main grate.

Inside, the Cuisinart Four Burner Dual Fuel Gas Grill features four burners, which can combine to produce 42,000 BTUs of heat. The ceramic-coated burners have stainless steel covers to protect them from falling grease, which is guided into a removable grease trap below. The grease trap is accessible from the front or rear of the base, though it could stand to be a little deeper to avoid splashing when moved around. Everything inside that’s liable to get covered in grease and food scraps is easily removable for cleaning.

The grill has a solid cover with a large, stainless steel handle. The front of that cover has a very convenient window with a thermometer on it, making it easy to check on the food and temperature.

There are shelves on either side of the grill. The left one is strictly a shelf with a few knobs for hanging tongs, grill brushes, spatulas and the like. The right one can serve as a shelf but also has a covered stove-style gas burner underneath. That burner has its own control knob at the front of the shelf. The propane venturi tube and igniter are exposed underneath this burner, though — something to remember when moving the grill or when kids are nearby. The burner also sits in a recess that likes to gather debris and water — another thing to keep in mind for maintaining and cleaning the grill. 

The base has magnetically latching cabinet doors and a tightening holder for a propane tank. There’s a bit of spare room for some grilling accessories down there as well. That wiggle room makes it easy to get the propane tank situated and hooked up inside. 

The whole unit sits on four locking casters. The locking feature is handy for unlevel ground, but the wheels could be better for moving the grill around. They’re a bit small and hard, making for a bumpy, noisy ride across pavement and a bit of difficulty getting over anything that’s not perfectly smooth. Moving the grill isn’t made any easier by the lack of a solid handle, as the front handle and the side shelves aren’t ideal for the job.

Each burner has its own knob for control and ignition. As nice as those knobs look to start – they share that same stainless steel color as many other elements of the grill – they’re just painted plastic and have started peeling in the short time I’ve been testing.

Cuisinart Four Burner Dual Fuel Gas Grill review: operation and performance

This grill can certainly help put on a cookout. Even after letting too much stuff get burnt onto the grates, the Cuisinart can heat in a hurry. The four burners inside absolutely dump heat, making it possible to get up over 500 degrees in no time. More reasonable cooking temperatures are even easier to reach and simple enough to maintain, thanks to the thermometer on the front of the lid.

The cast iron grates are lovely, making for pronounced grill lines with which to decorate your food. Meanwhile, the warming rack up top provides a handy space to toss ready-to-eat food if folks haven’t grabbed their plates or prepped their buns yet. All the space in the grill is also handy for cooking a variety of different things at the same time, and the shape of the grates helps keep sausage links and dogs from rolling around too much.

Propane proves its perks over charcoal in the amount of time it takes to start and stop grilling. It’s far quicker to get ready than a bunch of charcoal, and there’s no two-hour winding down period after cooking is done. It was also easy to change temperatures to cook different foods, and when someone wanted a burger after I’d turned the grill off, it was easy enough to whip it back into action. There’s also the option of natural gas with an adapter.

Even with all that heat, the front handle on the lid is well insulated, always staying cool to the touch. It doesn’t need to be used too often, as the window in the lid makes it easy to check on food without opening the grill, though a built-in light would be handy.

With a 12,000 BTU heating capacity, the stove-top-style side burner can also dial up the heat for cooking in a pan or boiling water. It does a good job staying lit even with a bit of a breeze, though it seems to be limited to either very high or high heat.

Cuisinart Four Burner Dual Fuel Gas Grill review: verdict 

This grill proves itself perfectly capable. It would have been nice to see the grill components fit together better, but it still heats impressively and puts on a good show aesthetically. For the price, it’s not disappointing, though there are some other options that look ready to do just about the same job for a lower price. 

Despite its cheaper competitors, this Cuisinart model sits in a good place combining performance with a reasonably robust and visually pleasing design.

Cuisinart Four Burner Dual Fuel Gas Grill review: also consider

If the Cuisinart doesn’t do it for you, the similarly priced Weber Traveler – a portable gas grill that folds up like a deckchair – is a good option. Or, for those looking for a premium product at a premium price, the huge and handsome Weber Genesis EPX-335 is among the best smart grills that (a lot of) money can buy.