Victory® Gas Grill Expert Review

The Skinny:

• All-stainless steel construction defends against rust and is backed by best-in-class warranties
• Effortless Piezo ignitor provides a quick start, with backup ignition for extra reliability
• Engineered with Triple Ridge Flame Tamers for excellent overall cooking performance
• Remarkably even temperatures that tackle delicate and aggressive heats equally well
• Features a fully enclosed cart and steakhouse-level, 12,000-BTU infrared side sear burner

Victory is ours, and we can tell you what our engineers set out to do: take every expectation you have for a solid gas grill, make it as durable as humanly possible, leave out the features most Entry-Level brands ignore, aim that price tag lower than a limbo champion, and fire all cylinders at full throttle. Did we succeed? Read along for the details, but if you’d rather a spoiler: absolutely.

You see, after more than 20 years in the grilling game, we’ve seen it all, heard it all, and sold it all. And all those years of sterling customer service meant a mountain of product feedback. Let us put it to you this way: everything you’ve loved about those grills, we’ve done here; everything you haven’t, we’ve left out. This is the grill you buy when you expect—no, insist upon—excellence on a budget. Everything in the name is represented in this design: the Victory gas grill is a heavyweight contender at the price point of an underdog, and it pulls no punches in helping you celebrate the moments that matter. Between solid construction, powerful grilling performance, and a best-in-class, lifetime warranty, we’ve done away with the compromises and built a champion so you can taste Victory.

To put our victorious vision to the test, we asked Chef Tony to run his rigorous rounds of testing on every aspect of the Victory gas grill. His findings provide an objective, real-world picture of the grill’s quality, performance, and features, the 3 major components by which we judge every product. Read on to see the results.

Quality:

Built with nothing but steel and supported by a lifetime warranty, the Victory gas grill will flourish with impeccable strength in practically any environment.

Nine months before release, our R&D department took our prototype gas grill outside and sprayed it down, inside and out, with a supersaturated saline mixture of three-parts salt, one-part water. We then parked it outside in the humid Louisianan heat to endure whatever molecular breakdown nature intended. The only rust we’ve seen is surface-level, and the prototype grill was still performing like a dream nearly a year later. Once Chef Tony got the XRF gun out to measure the materials, it all became clear: the burners, flame tamers, fire box, and exterior of the grill and cart all tested to be varying levels of 400-grade stainless steel, great for an Entry-Level grill. Then came the calipers, which recorded 16-gauge fire box walls, a 20-gauge hood exterior and interior liner, and 21-gauge tube burners; these thickness are more in line with industry standards.

• Pop open the hood, and you’ll find a removable secondary grilling surface along with solid, 7mm steel cooking rods with a durable chrome finish — a great thickness for this grill class, according to Chef Tony. The main grilling area measures 464 square inches for 26 ⅛” wide by 18” deep with two 12 ½” wide side shelves, and each shelf includes tool hooks for easily reaching your favorite BBQ utensils. That spacious grilling area is safe inside the double-lined grill hood and walls, which lend extra sturdiness while retaining more heat thanks to their thickness. As for the cart, we’ve fully enclosed it to protect grilling gear from the elements: that’s something any griller used to the Entry-Level class will love. Not to mention the double-walled access doors on the front, Chef Tony says, which don’t have the flimsy, wobbly feel you can sometimes encounter in this class.

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• Finally, our confidence in this grill is so high that the warranty coverage we’re offering is bar none. Victory ships with a best-in-class, lifetime warranty on the exterior and a whopping 15 years on the internal components (grill grates, flame tamers, burners, warming rack, and so on). We even offer 2 years on incidental parts — such as the ignition and thermometers — which is double the next-best grill in this class. “(The warranty) really sets the Victory gas grill apart in its class,” Chef Tony says. With this sterling standard in place, it’s a fair bet to say that we didn’t engineer the Victory gas grill to be a gamble: it’s a sure thing, built to perform and perform well. We’ll call that a victory any day.

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Performance:

After rounds of thoughtful design and brutal testing, the Victory gas grill undoubtedly performs to an exceptional degree.

Where you want any grill to shine is its performance, and Victory doesn’t break that trend. This is especially the case with the trio of 12,000-BTU, stainless steel tubular burners that power the main cooking surface (with painless Piezo ignition built right in). As always, we turned to Chef Tony’s thermocouple tests to measure temperature evenness and variance on both high and low heat settings. The high-heat trial yielded an average cooking-surface temperature of 620°F after 15 minutes of preheating — high enough to sear just about anything you’d like, per our intrepid grill tester — while that number jumped to 657°F at the 20-minute mark. With all burners on low for 30 minutes, meanwhile, the average temperature at the cooking surface registered 295°F, certifably great for a gas grill at this price point. Victory’s temperature variance was also noteworthy: the readout furthest from the high-heat average was off by 74°F, while the low-end variance clocked in at just 33°F off the average. “That’s tough to beat,” says Chef Tony.

• Earlier, we mentioned those 7mm steel-plated grill grates. They cover 464 square inches of main cooking area, along with another 162 square inches across the secondary warming rack — good for a class-leading 626 square inches of grilling space. Underneath the grates, we’ve got 18-gauge stainless steel Triple Ridge Flame Tamers, designed to leave no flat spots for grease. That means you can forget flare-ups; any wayward dribbles of juice are sizzled back into smoky flavor or wicked to the full-width, pull-out drip tray. Our engineers clearly wanted a flame tamer that could handle grease while holding and spreading enough heat to provide even cooking front-to-back, side-to-side. Speaking of even heating, this Victory grill doubles down with full-coverage heat baffles designed to deflect even more heat back toward your food.

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Of course, Chef Tony was perhaps most eager to put those highly touted flame tamers to the test. He examined their effectiveness by cooking as many burger patties as he could at once, and it’s safe to say he was wowed. The burger test went very well and really showcased the rock-solid performance of Victory’s flame-taming setup, Chef Tony says. You’re able to get that perfectly controlled flame kiss that you’re looking for when you flip your burgers. Overall, we saw excellent performance from Victory’s flame-taming system. It just far exceeded the standard for this class of grill.

That tracks perfectly with our R&D team’s prototype tests, which aimed to create massive flare-ups. They drizzled the assembled interior in the following oil-based flammable condiments, all at once: 2 bottles of BBQ sauce, 1 bottle of buffalo, a can of sunscreen, a jar of baking grease, a jar of tomato sauce, and even ¼ a bottle of olive oil. They wanted to turn this grill into a fireball, and just couldn’t do it. Only under the harshest conditions could our developers get a flare-up; this grill simply would not burst into roaring flames. If they can’t make it happen on purpose, we highly doubt you’ll be able to pull it off by accident.

Features:

Between great features and a formidable infrared side sear burner, the Victory gas grill doesn’t take good enough for an answer.

• Another big Victory moment here is built into its side shelf: the 12,000-BTU infrared side sear burner. Some side burners output too little power, making them barely capable of boiling water. To contrast, this burner doesn’t even belong in the same sentence. It’s a small area of very high temperature, perfect for small cooking tasks without involving the entire grill top while doubling as a great sear station. It even has a dedicated drip tray, making cleanup incredibly simple. Chef Tony assigned this burner a Good rating, but that’s compared with other infrared sear burners in higher grill classes; the fact that it’s even present on an Entry-Level model pushes it into Great territory in his eyes.

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Despite going above and beyond from the jump, the Victory gas grill doesn’t skimp on regular expectations. That started with the most accurate built-in hood thermometer we could develop, boldly departing from the norm with a modern, rectangular design. But if you’re less worried about the hood thermometer and more concerned with where to store your BBQ accessories, Victory’s side shelves include 8 grilling tool hooks for simple access. Larger items like propane tanks will find plenty of room and protection in the fully enclosed storage cart, a relative rarity among Entry-Level gas grills. We’ve previously called out the Piezo ignition built right into the knobs (eliminating the need for batteries), but Victory also includes 2 secondary sources of backup ignition: match-light ports towards the back of the grates, one on either side of the grill. And between each set of burners are crossover channels that allow you to light all burners once you’ve got the first one ignited.

Other components include 4 heavy-duty casters (2 locking) and a full-width drip tray, perfect for catching those stray drippings and simplifying cleanup. But you’ll be seeing few of those with the final ace up the Victory’s sleeve: a highly engineered heat baffle system. Resting beneath the burners, it sizzles runaway juices while reflecting heat back to the cooking surface. For a fringe benefit, this saves that drip tray below from excessive temperatures. Heat baffle systems aren’t new to the Entry-Level gas grill class, but we don’t see many with as much careful engineering behind them as this one. We’ve been told the R&D crew went through over 20 separate designs to protect the internals against flare-ups, guaranteeing a high-quality cookout every time. Tastes like victory to us.