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When it comes to kitchen appliances, few brands fuel the hype machine like Ninja. Their release of the viral Creami ice cream maker was a break-the-internet moment, sweeping TikTok with such force you'd forget KitchenAids had been on the market for decades. Three years later, the Slushi dropped, and suddenly everyone you knew was a frozen drink evangelist.
Chalk Ninja's success up to a mix of functionality, streamlined design, and the lightning-in-a-bottle word of mouth only social media can afford. The bedrock here is that they make undeniably good products, albeit ones that are received so rapturously it becomes our job to ask, "Are they really that great?"
Our editor Victoria was a fan (if not a stan) of the Creami in her honest review last year, and I've been impressed by the slushies friends are churning out right and left. Yet when I heard that Ninja's latest release was the Foodi ($219.99), an indoor grill, my inner skeptic reared his head up more than usual.
For context, I'm blessed with yard space and the outdoor grill to go with it. An indoor grill might make less sense in my scenario, on paper at least, but as a voracious cook and eater I had questions that needed answering. An electrical appliance might be able to make grill marks, but without flames or charcoals, would the food taste grilled at all? Was the soul of grilled food that easily divorced from an open fire? There was only one way to find out… embark on an honest review of my own.
We like
- Wide range of functions (grill, fry, dehydrate) with intuitive design
- Lightning-fast preheat times
- Optional probe thermometer for foolproof cooking
- Quick, even browning, and prominent grill marks at Medium temperature
We don't like
- The eponymous "grill" sometimes feels like an air fryer with a different surface
- The device is indeed smokeless, but its odors travel further indoors than with a conventional oven
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What's an Indoor Grill, Anyway?
Before diving in, I did a bit of research. The Ninja Foodi is powered by what the brand refers to as "cyclonic grilling technology," where a powerful fan circulates extremely hot air (up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit) around the food on all sides. This creates a "surround searing" effect that delivers fast, even cooking, simulating the intense heat an outdoor grill can build up when its hood is closed. Add to that a high-heat grate that generates grill marks, and you get food cooked by intense, direct heat without the need for an actual flame source.
This is where I started to nitpick. As someone who's used many an air fryer, I know they also rely on circulating hot air around, an admittedly ingenious feature that has given them deserved popularity. There's no better way to get even browning and crispiness. Yet when the distinction that makes this a grill is simply swapping the fry basket out for a grate, it seemed to me this might be just an air fryer (or convection oven) by another name. Could the Ninja Foodi really replicate the smoke and char of a backyard BBQ?
First Impressions
All that said, to unbox the Ninja Foodi is to be instantly charmed. I opted to test the 6-in-1 Indoor Grill and 4-Quart Air Fryer, a sleek little unit that takes up far less counter space than I expected. There's virtually no assembly required, simply swapping out cook surfaces depending on if you're roasting, grilling or frying. Ninja has a knack for not gilding the lily, and the front display gave me nothing more than what I needed. The intuitive user design made choosing my cook type, time and temperature easy from the very first use.
Eager to try out the Grill function first, I took a scan through the user manual, assuming times and temps would vary from grilling over fire. Turns out they do, with the Foodi cooking faster than the average outdoor grill, but the manual gave helpful guidelines tailored to different proteins and veg. I was even more stoked to find that every component of the Foodi was dishwasher safe, though a scrub brush was included for good measure.
The only speed bump during set-up was finding the right counter spot, since the hood was too tall to fully open when placed underneath my cabinets. Since that says more about my (cramped) kitchen than any design flaw on Ninja's part, the experience was pretty flawless up to this point. All that was left to do was get grilling.
Test Runs
As a carnivore despite my progressive aspirations, I decided to grill two true-blue classics: chicken thighs and burgers. The chicken thighs were skin-on, which is notoriously tricky for the outdoor grill, requiring constant flipping to avoid flare-ups. That made them the perfect choice to test out the Foodi's built-in timer, which gives a helpful "FLIP" message halfway through cooking. For burgers on the other hand, I went with frozen patties, in order to check if cyclonic grilling could really brown something straight out of the freezer.
I followed the user manual's time and temp guidance for chicken thighs, and sure enough after a quick pre-heat and 25 minute grill, the chicken was gorgeously, evenly browned. Which is fantastic if that's what you're going for… but different than what grilled chicken usually looks like. I found no evidence of grill marks, and the texture felt way more like something that had been, well, air fried.
Though I followed the brand's guidance on cook temperature (High, or 500 F), the internal fan was clearly so hot throughout that the chicken simply crisped. Again, not a bad thing per se if you've ever had crispy chicken skin, but it left me unconvinced about the grilling of it all.
The burgers were a different story: despite their subzero state, the patties came away with perfect grill marks. My working theory is that that's because I lowered the heat from High to Medium, which allowed more cooking from the grill grate instead of the high-performance fan. They even tasted charred, worlds apart from the chicken, though it's hard to replicate the smoky flavors of something truly flame-kissed. Then again, the Foodi never claimed to literally substitute the outdoor grilling experience, so it started to make sense to me as a different but related alternative. Especially in apartments, or in travel scenarios where you want convenience, there's a lot to be said for how compact and portable it is.
The other functions worked great, too, especially (no surprise) the Air Fry. It worked like a charm when I fried up samosas, which I've had trouble crisping up in standard ovens, and dried out fruit slices perfectly when I tried out the Dehydrate mode. The only bigger drawback for me was how much the cooking smells took over my kitchen — much more so than when I cook in a larger appliance. Depending on how often you grill or air fry, you can weigh the pros against that con. For a standard bake or roast, I'd stick to your household oven.
My Two Cents
The concept of an indoor grill is by no means new. Just ask George Foreman and his '90s cookware phenomenon. Yet the Foodi's powerful heating technology and combination of multiple cook functions all feel cutting-edge, just the latest product of Ninja's products to fully capture the zeitgeist. For my money, it's a fantastic air fryer, convection oven, dehydrator… and a pretty good grill. But that's coming from a self-confessed stan of cooking meals over an open fire.
If that's not your thing, or just not in the cards on the average day, the Foodi has plenty to offer. Depending on how often you'll want to grill versus air fry, it may or may not be worth the higher price tag (their standard Air Fryer clocks in at just $89.99). It's intuitive, it's powerful, it's smokeless, but hype beasts be damned, it's not the Second Coming of cookware.
And you know what? Maybe that's okay.
