How the Grilliance Kit Turned My Blackstone Into a Backyard Hibachi Restaurant

I bought my Blackstone 36-inch flat top griddle in the summer of 2022, and for nearly two years after that I cooked on it with exactly one tool: a thin, flexible spatula I grabbed off a clearance rack at Walmart for about three dollars. The spatula bent under pressure. It couldn't scrape the edges clean. It was too narrow to flip pancakes without them folding over on themselves. But I kept using it because I didn't know what I was missing. The griddle was already a step up from my old gas grill for certain cooks, and I convinced myself the tool situation was fine. It wasn't fine.

The moment I realized I had a tool problem was my nephew's graduation cookout in June of last year. Forty people, a long afternoon, and I'd promised smash burgers, hibachi shrimp, and a big tray of griddle fried rice. Three cooks in, the spatula handle got so hot I had to use a dish towel to hold it. My burger press was a coffee mug turned upside down. I didn't have a basting cover, so my shrimp weren't steaming through properly. The food still tasted good, but I was fighting the griddle the whole time instead of running a smooth cook. A buddy of mine leaned over and said, 'Man, you're out here doing surgery with a butter knife.' He wasn't wrong. That's when I started looking seriously at getting a proper griddle accessories kit, and after reading through a handful of options I landed on the Grilliance 27-piece griddle kit.

I'll be honest: I was a little skeptical of a kit that comes with 27 pieces. My experience with big-box grill tool sets is that you get two or three items you actually use and twenty-four things that collect grease in a drawer. But the Grilliance set is built differently. The core of it is a pair of wide, beveled spatulas with thick handles that don't transfer heat the way the cheap ones do. Those two spatulas alone justified the purchase. I can now flip four smash burgers at once, press them flat without bending the blade, and scrape a full griddle surface clean in about thirty seconds. That's not a minor upgrade. That's a different cooking experience entirely.

The burger press changed my smash burger game in a way I hadn't expected. I used to put all my weight behind the coffee-mug trick and still end up with patties that weren't thin enough to get that crispy lacework crust on the edges. The Grilliance press is heavy, flat, and has a handle that stays cool. One firm press and the patty is exactly where I want it. My brother-in-law, who is a hard man to impress about food, came over two Saturdays after I started using the kit and told me those were the best smash burgers he'd had outside of a restaurant. I'm not going to pretend that isn't exactly what I wanted to hear.

I was fighting the griddle the whole time instead of running a smooth cook. One proper kit changed that completely.

The basting cover is the piece I reach for almost as often as the spatulas. It's a dome-shaped cover you drop over food to trap steam and speed up the cook, especially useful for cheese melting on burgers or getting shrimp to cook through without drying out. I'd been improvising with a cast iron lid that didn't fit right and vented steam everywhere. The Grilliance cover sits flush and does its job quietly. Now when I do hibachi-style shrimp I finish them under the cover for the last ninety seconds and they come off the griddle plump and cooked through every time.

There are a couple of pieces in the kit I haven't used as much. The scraper tool overlaps a bit with what the spatulas can already do, and the smaller tongs feel a little light for the kind of loads I'm moving around. I'm not going to claim all 27 pieces are equally essential, because that's not honest. But the spatulas, the burger press, the basting cover, and the squeeze bottles for oil and sauce are genuinely excellent tools that I use every single cookout. That's four pieces doing the heavy lifting, and the rest are there when you need them. For the price the full set runs on Amazon right now, those four pieces alone are worth it.

The first full cookout I ran with the complete Grilliance setup, I fed twelve people: smash burgers, hibachi chicken and vegetables, and a big batch of griddle fried rice to close it out. No improvising, no fighting tools, no cramping my hand around a handle that was burning through a dish towel. Everything ran smooth. My neighbor's teenage daughter asked me if I'd taken a cooking class. I told her I just finally got the right tools. That's really the whole story.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

Here's the honest version: if you own a Blackstone or any flat top griddle and you're still cooking with whatever came in a random bundle or a clearance-bin spatula, you're leaving real enjoyment on the table. Not because you need expensive tools to cook good food, but because the right tools stop getting in your way. Flat top cooking is already a more active, faster-moving style than low-and-slow BBQ. You're managing heat zones, flipping things at different times, basting and steaming all at once. Cheap tools that don't hold up under those conditions turn a fun cook into a frustrating one.

The Grilliance kit is the upgrade I should have made the day I bought my Blackstone instead of two years later. It's not a luxury buy. It's a workbench buy, the kind of thing that makes the equipment you already own perform the way it was supposed to. If your griddle has been sitting under-used because the experience wasn't quite clicking, there's a real chance the problem is the tools, not the griddle. I'd point you toward the full review for the deep breakdown of every piece, but if you want the short version from someone who spent two years doing it the hard way: get the kit. You'll feel the difference the first time you press a burger patty the right way.