I love watching movies. Sometime during the past year, I realized with pleasure that the “hangout movie” is a thing. Plot is not paramount, but hanging out with your onscreen pals and having a good time is. Think of classics like The Big Lebowski or Jackie Brown. Dazed and Confused and … almost anything else by Richard Linklater, for that matter. You are made happier and perhaps even enriched by time spent with those characters.

In that vein, I just spent several weeks cooking on what I came to think of as a “hangout griddle.” Known simply as the Weber Griddle, it's 504 square inches for the three-burner version I tested—which provides plenty of space to cook for six to eight people—or 756 square inches for the four-burner model. For the right person, they can feel like a giant canvas to paint or play on. Last year I reviewed a Cuisinart griddle that was only a mediocre performer, though I still loved cooking on it. My sister, an accomplished natural cook, took one look at that Cuisinart and declared that she wanted to cover it in a pound of bacon. This summer we inaugurated the Weber with two pounds. What carnivore wouldn't want to hang out with us?

As a quick explainer, Weber's griddle is like taking one of the company’s three-burner gas grills and removing the grates (and lid) and replacing them with a giant, flat cast-iron surface. Ignite the burners, heat that surface, and cook. You give up some classic gas-grill abilities, but you get a lot in exchange, most notably that the flat cooking surface is like an enormous cast-iron pan made for cooking a ton of food at once.

Nowhere are its wonderful capabilities better on display than at breakfast, where you could have your home fries, sausages, and eggs all cooking at different temperatures and come out at the same time. If you've ever had dreams of becoming a short-order breakfast cook, a griddle like this is your key to fulfillment.

This particular griddle made me curious, because it's made by Weber, a company famous for the quality and value of its charcoal and gas grills. Weber is often excellent at nailing the basics, and I wanted to see how something new from the big-name company would do in an emerging category.

For those three weeks at my folks' place in New Hampshire this year, we typically had between five and eight big eaters and centered our cooking around it, really appreciating how much it could churn out in a hurry. Sticking with breakfasts, I developed a frequent habit of turning it on for whatever the main course would be, then tossing some sliced onion cross sections on and letting them cook slowly while I prepped everything else. Fried eggs are a lot of fun here since there's no pan wall in the way; just slide your spatula in horizontally and flip. Those little egg rings are particularly enjoyable to use, helping you create Egg McMuffin-style eggs. Previously, I thought of griddled tomato slices only as something for a proper English breakfast, but I'll be making these beauties, occasionally with a few bread crumbs sprinkled over them, as much as possible from now until I die.

Pancakes have never had a better medium. Whip up a pitcher of batter and use it to pour directly onto the griddle. When I forgot to add blueberries to the batter one morning, I flipped a pint's worth into the corner opposite the grease tray opening, covered them with a little lid called a "melting dome," and squirted a little water under there with a squeeze bottle. What emerged two minutes later was syrupy, concentrated, and delicious.

What I started to notice was that the kind of food I made on the griddle was the kind of food many of us cook most of the time, which I might call "hopefully delicious and not too complicated." Not fancy cookbook food, but stuff that's easy to riff on while you shoot the breeze with whoever's around. It's the kind of appliance where sometimes the best and most fun way to get butter onto the grill is to use the stick as an applicator.

I really locked into the vibe when I asked a Weber rep for links to videos that demonstrated certain attributes I was interested in. Among her list of links was a dude in his late fifties on TikTok who did things like start cooking by flipping the spatulas—one in each hand—in the air, teppanyaki-dork style, along with a little spatula drumroll before cooking some really normal-looking food, taking a bite, and exclaim-questioning: Are you kidding me?

This wasn't an Everybody Wants Some!! hangout vibe, but he definitely understood the hash-slinging good time.

I went nuts after that. Griddled vegetables are fantastic here, the flat surface creating a nice brown crust on peppers and onions for brats, thick slices of zucchini and squash as sides, a gigunda pile of something vaguely succotash-esque. I grilled mass quantities of asparagus, and none of them fell between the grates because there are no grates.

What else? I cooked food like marinated chicken thighs, shrimp that also didn't fall between the grates, and potato rosti, for which a griddle is heaven-sent. A mountainous stir fry, pork chops with a harissa rub. I even made some spectacular America's Test Kitchen ribs that I started in the oven and finished on the griddle.

Most of the time I cooked, I had fun, perhaps because I cook a lot and wasn't too worried about everything coming out perfect, but a lot of that fun-having had to do with the Weber performing well. If it had a lid, many people would likely find they’d prefer it to a regular gas grill. There was almost nothing to get used to, no idiosesyncrasies to deal with. It nailed the basics. I could get something going, then sit in a rocking chair across the little deck from the griddle, and talk about fishing with dad until the chops were ready to flip. Flare-ups are impossible, the heat was even. I used a Combustion thermometer with a readout I could see from 10 feet away, and it told me how long until I needed to move.

As far as those vitals go, the Weber is fairly easy to light, and the heat is evenly distributed, something I verified with a thermal camera. The only notable cool spots were in the corners, more of an inevitability than a fault.

It does have plenty of space to set stuff down, with two generous side tables and a low table between the legs. One thing I'd love to see for all griddles is some sort of detachable, dishwasher-safe griddle utensil holster; Griddle tools are large and get messy, and I was always looking for a good spot to set them down during cooking without making a mess.

I did find myself wishing it had leveling feet. Cooking scrambled eggs is a trip on a griddle as they spread out then cook in a hot minute, and not having them run downhill shouldn't be a function of needing a perfectly flat patio surface.

I also noticed a (very!) slight depression in the center of the cooking surface. Surprisingly, it didn't bug me too much, probably because it would have been more annoying if it was domed in the center. I would also have appreciated a bit more adjustability in the heat settings and more of a barrier along the front to channel heat away from the person doing the grilling.

I really appreciated that after three weeks of heavy use, the easy-to-empty grease trap was only about a third full, and we'd used only about one propane tank worth of fuel. If it had a lid that you could use while cooking that would facilitate handling larger cuts, a rarity among its competition, it would be approaching a perfect score.

But c’mon dude, soften the focus a little. Perfection isn't the point with griddles. Yes, you can cook something fancy or technically challenging on it, but you could also make burgers, and maybe make some griddled onions and toasted buns on there, and while you're doing that, crack a brewski and shoot the breeze with your pals. On a nice night, with the sun going down, that's more perfect anyway.