When the power goes out, the kitchen takes the hardest hit. No stovetop. No oven. No fridge or freezer. No microwave. And once an outage stretches into a second or third day, the real question isn’t “what’s for dinner?”…
It’s “how do we actually cook the food we already have?”
That’s the lens we look through whenever we shop for new gear here at Food Prep Guide.
So when Stacy upgraded her grill to something that could handle real cooking when the grid can’t, we knew we had to share it. This is the Eminence 605 by Monument Grills, and after putting it together and firing it up, here’s where we landed.
Why a gas grill earns its place in a prep plan
It’s a gas grill, which means the simple, important thing first: when the grid is down, this thing still puts food on the table.
What makes it worth a second look is the fuel flexibility. It runs on a standard propane tank, or you can convert it to a natural gas line. The propane route is the one that matters most for preparedness — it means you aren’t depending on anything coming into the house at all. Keep a couple of full tanks in the shed and you can cook for a long stretch.
There’s a smart display, lights, and an app on this grill too (more on those below), but here’s the part that surprised us: the grill doesn’t need to be plugged in for normal use.
The LED display and the knob lights run off a built-in high-capacity battery, and the electronic ignition runs on that same battery without any trouble. So even the “smart” parts keep working when the wall outlets don’t.
Unboxing and assembly: heavy in a good way
It shows up in two boxes, and a fair warning — they’re heavy. The listing puts the assembled grill around 175 pounds, and you feel every bit of it from the first box.
Inside you get the grill, the cooking grates, a rotisserie kit, two meat probes, and the drip and grease trays. We also picked up a few extras you’ll see in the video: a cast iron sear grate, a smoke box, a baking stone, and a cleaning brush with a replaceable head. Right out of the gate the parts feel solid — heavy stainless and cast iron, nothing flimsy.
Quick note: Monument Grills is offering our audience an exclusive discount!
Use the code: Eminence100
Assembly is where the weight works against you a bit, but to me that just proves how solid it is. The manual is easy to follow — standard numbered parts, lettered hardware — but plan on a second set of hands for a couple of steps, especially lifting the body onto the cart and getting the lid on.
We put ours together indoors, and that’s where the casters earn their keep. They’re heavy-duty, and once the grill was assembled it rolled right out of the room, through the doorway, and onto the deck without a fight.
The build and the features
This is a full stainless build — solid steel grates, a heavy lid, and enclosed cabinet doors underneath for storage.
The cooking area is big: about 860 square inches total, which Monument rates at roughly 35 burgers at once. If you’re feeding a crowd or batch-cooking your way through a freezer’s worth of food, that space is a real advantage.
Underneath you’ve got six main burners, plus a rear infrared burner and a sear side burner (we’ll get to those). The cast iron grates hold heat well and lay down clean sear marks. There’s also a removable round center section — that’s where the rotisserie and the cast iron sear grate drop in.
The smart side
The Eminence 605 has what Monument calls the Digitemp display. It shows grill temperature, reads out both meat probes, tracks your fuel level, and controls the lights. There’s a Bluetooth app so you can watch temps from your phone, and the knobs light up — they can shift color with the grill’s temperature, or just cycle through colors for looks.
It’s genuinely nice to use. Watching the probe temperature climb on the display instead of guessing takes a lot of the stress out of a long cook.
One thing to flag: while the display, lights, and ignition all run off that built-in battery, the rotisserie motor does need household power. It’s excellent for everyday cooking, but it’s the one feature that won’t run during an outage.
Everything else is gas. You can light the burners and cook a full meal with none of the electronics on. My advice — keep a long-reach lighter with your grill gear as a backup, and think of the screen and lights as everyday convenience rather than something the meal depends on.
Cooking on it
Heat first. Monument rates it at 89,000 BTUs across all the burners, and it climbs fast — they claim 800 degrees in about ten minutes, and in real use it does get screaming hot in a hurry. In a power-out scenario that speed matters; you’re not babysitting a slow grill while it burns through fuel.
The six main burners give you real control across the surface. Run them all for a full load, or light just a couple of zones to save fuel when you’re only cooking for two. That flexibility is exactly what you want when fuel is something you’re rationing.
The sear side burner is the steakhouse trick. It’s a high-output infrared burner on the left shelf, and it gets hot enough to put a proper crust on a steak — the kind you usually can’t manage on a standard grate.
Heat distribution across the main grates looked very even, with no big cold corners, and the cast iron holds temperature when you open the lid — which is half the battle on a cold day.
And as the sun drops, the whole control panel glows, so you can actually see what you’re doing out there at night. For cooking after dark that’s more useful than it sounds, and it looks great too.
So, is it worth it?
The Eminence 605 is a big, well-built gas grill with more cooking power and smart features than we expected at the price.
For the everyday cook, it’s a lot of grill. But for the way we think about things here — keeping the ability to cook real meals when the grid goes quiet — it checks the box that matters most. It cooks on gas, with a propane option that makes it fully independent of the utility. The screen and the lights are a nice bonus on a normal night, and no loss at all on a hard one!
