Hamilton Beach Steak Lover's Indoor Grill 25331 Review

First Impressions of the Hamilton Beach 25331

There is no assembly. Take it out of the box, wipe the plates, plug it in.

The silhouette reads as a panini press more than a grill. Two ribbed plates face each other across a shallow gap. The upper one hangs from polished arms that rise out of the back corners.

Those arms are the detail worth noticing. They carry slots rather than a plain pivot. The top plate can climb straight up and still sit parallel to the bottom one.

Controls live on a narrow skirt across the front. A small red display sits between two arrow buttons. An amber sear button glows to the right of it.

First cook, two flat sirloins. Press SEAR, wait for the beep, lay them down, close the lid. Dark bars appear on both faces inside a minute, with nothing to turn over.

Ninety seconds on, the grill beeps again and backs itself off. The steaks kept cooking at the gentler setting while we laid the table.

Key Features of the Hamilton Beach 25331

The feature list is short. Almost all of it points at one moment in the cook. Everything Hamilton Beach chose to engineer here serves the first ninety seconds. What happens afterwards is left broad and largely unstated.

• 100 square inches of ribbed nonstick: Four burgers at a time, on the maker’s count. The listing artwork counts the same surface as four tuna steaks. Thin cuts are what the artwork keeps showing.
• A sear on a timer: One press takes both plates to 500 degrees F. The grill beeps on arrival and holds for 90 seconds. Then it hands control back to your setting.
• Floating hinge: Hamilton Beach’s own term. The slotted arms let the top plate rise and stay level. A deep steak or a loaded sandwich is not crushed.
• Illuminated controls: A digital readout with an arrow either side, plus a lit sear button. The display flashes while you pick a setting and stops flashing once it is chosen.
• Stainless steel: The hinge arms and the trim around them. Amazon’s listing name calls the finish black and stainless. Everything else you touch is black moulded plastic.
• Removable drip tray: It slides in beneath the front lip and catches the fat. The tray itself goes in the dishwasher.
• A meal in under 10 minutes: The maker’s claim, and a believable one for anything flat. Two hot faces halve the time a single plate would need.

What the list leaves out matters as much. No heat range is given beyond the sear figure. The numbers on that display have no published meaning. There is no window, no probe socket, and no second zone to shift food into.

Heat and cooking performance

The argument for this machine is contact, and it holds up. Heat arrives on the top and bottom of the food simultaneously. A flat steak takes bar marks on both faces in under a minute.

That geometry decides the menu. Burgers, chicken breast, flank and fish take the bars cleanly. Vegetables do well too, held against the heat by the top plate.

Indoors, 500 degrees F puts real colour on meat. That figure is also the only heat number attached to this grill. The arrow buttons move a number up and down. Hamilton Beach never says what range that number covers.

So the sear is precise and everything after it is guesswork. You know exactly what the first 90 seconds did. For the rest of the cook you steer by an unexplained number.

The fixed dose is the deeper issue. Ninety seconds at 500 degrees is generous for flank steak. It is thin for a deep ribeye.

The hinge will happily close on that ribeye. The sear treats it exactly like the flank.

Build, handling and durability

The hinge is the piece that justifies the price. Slotted arms are more work to make than a simple pivot. They earn it every time you cook. Pressing down on a sandwich does not rock the body.

The handle is a plastic bar spanning the top of both arms. It gives a wide grip well clear of the hot plates.

Below the coating, nothing is described. The plates are called nonstick and that is the end of it. Neither the metal underneath nor the coating itself is named anywhere on the maker’s page.

Two published measurements do not agree. The maker’s page gives 12.09 wide and 12.87 deep. The listing diagram gives 12.8 across and 11.5 deep.

Shut, the body is under seven inches tall either way. A cupboard shelf will take it.

Running costs, upkeep and value

The electricity a ten-minute cook draws is not worth a paragraph. The interesting money is in what you can buy for it later. The answer is almost nothing.

Hamilton Beach’s page for the 25331 now reads NO LONGER AVAILABLE. The spares list beneath it holds a single item. That item is a drip tray, part 25324, at $8.99.

No cooking plate appears on that list, at any price. What cooks your food here is a layer of nonstick, nothing more. Coatings are the part that goes first.

That reframes the whole purchase. This is not an appliance you keep going. It is one you use until the nonstick gives up. The tray you can replace is the part least likely to need it.

Cleaning follows from the same design. Only the tray is named dishwasher safe, and the plates are fixed in the body. They get wiped where they sit, between ridges, with the top plate hanging over your hand.

Our September 2026 capture found it in stock at Amazon, around $65.39. Our older capture of the maker’s own price reads $49.99, though nothing dates it. Either way, you are paying today’s money for a product its maker has stopped supporting.

Possible Hamilton Beach 25331 Complaints

• The sear does not know how thick your steak is: It runs 90 seconds and stops, whether the cut is half an inch or two. Thin food comes out beautifully. A deep cut drops to the lower setting before its crust has set. Searing it a second time is the workaround, and nothing on the grill tells you so.
• The cooking surface is not a serviceable part: Nonstick wears, and this nonstick cannot be bought separately. The moment it fails, the whole grill is scrap. Buyers only meet this fact years in, which is the worst possible time. Treat the coating gently from day one and use nothing metal on it.