Nomad Grill and Smoker Review: This Portable Grill Actually Brings the Heat

Everyone loves a backyard barbecue, but what if you don’t have a backyard? Not long ago, I ditched my house for a second-floor apartment. While I don’t miss mowing the lawn, the absence of convenient outdoor cooking hurts, as smoking and grilling have been huge fixtures of my year-round lifestyle, especially since beginning three book collaborations with barbecue master Aaron Franklin. Franklin Smoke, our third book, explored the intersection of grilling and smoking—my favorite way to cook. Once I lost my backyard, I had to find a grill that I could store in a closet and easily take outside when needed.

The portable grill market offers a wide range of models, but most of them excel at only one of two things: being easily transportable or grilling food well. The Nomad Grill and Smoker ($695) appears to be an exception, as it combines true portability and high-level grilling performance with versatility as a smoker. I discovered the Nomad last year via a hypnotic and mouth-watering Instagram video from my friend, the great live-fire chef Adam Perry Lang, who was using it to sear piles of tomahawk ribeyes. The unique design caught my eye, and I spent the summer testing a loaner model of the grill’s latest iteration, which comes with twice as much ventilation as the first-generation model. With minimal setup and easy breakdown, I happily found that I could be up and cooking in minutes whether at my apartment’s green space, a park picnic table, a truck’s tailgate, or a walk-in campsite.

The Nomad Grill and Smoker’s Brilliant Design

The Nomad may be the sleekest-looking piece of barbecue equipment ever created. It looks like something Q Division might have designed for James Bond, but every detail has a function, and no aspect is gratuitous. The more you use it, the deeper your appreciation gets.

The Nomad is shaped like a large briefcase or what used to be called a valise (before humanity woke up and put rollers on luggage). Its oversized plastic handle provides a comfortable and spacious grip. At 28 pounds, the Nomad is not something you’d want to schlep on a long trail, but for a short trip from hatchback to campsite, it’s compact and ideal.

The case’s exterior is made of perforated anodized aluminum, which gives it a polished industrial look but also provides toughness and airflow, as the exterior is really a shell for the grill inside. Two durable plastic briefcase-like clasps (that stay cool during use) unsnap to open the unit. When opened and laid flat, each half of the shell houses a heavy, die-cast aluminum box that will contain the fiery hot charcoal.

Together, the thick aluminum interior and shell allow for enough heat dissipation that the Nomad’s outer surface stays cool during use—enough so that you can set it on surfaces like picnic tables without fear of setting them ablaze.

Classic Charcoal Grilling

It takes two seconds to open the Nomad, and then it’s ready to go. The manufacturer sells proprietary high-quality charcoal made from Thai fruitwood and some fire-starter tumbleweeds, but any type of charcoal works. Whatever charcoal you use, I recommend starting it in a chimney, which is faster and easier than any other method.

The Nomad comes with a grill grate that covers one of the two sides when the box is open. Ordering another separately will let you double the area of grill surface (and add an extra three pounds to the total package). The grate itself is unique and speaks to the quality of the manufacturer’s workmanship and design. Made from rigid, cast stainless steel, its slightly convex shape (for structural integrity and coal clearance) features a honeycomb pattern that successfully prevents almost anything from falling through. For ingredients with a propensity to roll—sausages, asparagus—just turn the grate over and let it be a shallow basket. Cleverly, the grate is also magnetized, snapping satisfyingly into place and remaining there without rattling even when the Nomad is collapsed and on the move.

Once you dump the hot coals and set the grate on top, it takes five to ten minutes for the grill surface to get hot enough to cook on. Manual vents on the ends of each side allow for control over airflow. Open them to whip up the flames, close them partially to dampen heat, and shut them fully to extinguish the coals when the Nomad is folded and locked.

As a grill alone, the Nomad excels. The short distance between coal bed and cooking surface maximizes the heat intensity, making it perfect for searing. Every time, achieving a deep, flavorful crust on steaks was a breeze. For thicker cuts, I constructed a two-zone fire, mounding the coals on one half of the grill while spreading them out loosely on the other for a more mellow roast. Of course, you can also close the Nomad’s top to create an interior cooking chamber, which allows another set of possibilities.

Able and Creative Smoking

The ability to instantly shut the suitcase lid and turn the Nomad into an oven or smoker is one of its best features. When closed, the Nomad’s built-in analog thermometer conveys the internal temperature, and the side vents to control airflow become ever more important. If you plan to close the lid to create oven-like conditions, definitely organize your grill in two zones to make room off the coals for your food to roast. The thermometer told me that after ten minutes I was hitting temperatures over 400 Fahrenheit when using a fair bit of charcoal, though it was easier to maintain temperatures in the 350-degree range.

In this mode, adding wood chunks or wood chips directly to the coals or on the grate above them will provide smoke. Then you can configure the vents to create draft: open the vent next to the coals while keeping the one above it closed and do the opposite on the other end. This pushes air directly to coals, which smolders the wood, while the open vent next to food pulls the smoke across and out.

Smoking any slow-cooking cut (think brisket, ribs, or pork shoulder) takes hours, and this is not where the Nomad shines. Its heat retention is good, but not in the same league as something like the Big Green Egg, thus you’ll need to replenish its coals fairly regularly, which is a bit of a pain considering you have to open it, set the meat aside, remove the hot grill, and add more hot charcoal that’s been prepped in a chimney.

My best results came from deploying the Nomad as the hybrid it is: smoking for short durations to add a savory-smoky layer of flavor on top of the juicy tang of charcoal grilling. In practice, that meant smoking marinated chicken parts with the Nomad closed for 20 to 30 minutes, then opening it, ditching the wood chunk, and cooking directly over the coals to get that pungent char. It worked just as well in reverse—searing thick-cut pork chops over high-heat coals, then moving them to the unheated end of the grill, adding a wood chunk over the coals, and smoking them for 15 to 20 minutes until done.

The results were spectacular, everything you’d want from a hybrid smoker-grill: professional quality cooking dynamics, achieved with great ease and efficiency, and a level of portability never before seen in a product like this.

When you’re done cooking, simply fold up the Nomad, snap the latches shut, close the vents, and your coals will be extinguished in no time. Cleaning up after any grill is never fun–no other word than filthy to describe ashes, grease, and char. The Nomad acquits itself well here too, though it is a bit unwieldy to turn over and dump. Nomad’s suggestion of using a shop vac to clean out the ashes is a good one. The rest cleans up well with a high-powered spray nozzle and maybe a little scrubbing if you want it to shine.

The only real downside of the Nomad is its price, listed on the website as $695. However, fans of both design and quality gear will recognize quality when they see it. And the Nomad is so brilliantly conceived, simple to use, and well-constructed, that it should not only function well for decades but also never go out of style.