Review: Our family TEFAL raclette Charbonade grill (We bought it 30 years ago!)

Most product reviews cover a few weeks. This one covers three decades, because the machine in these photographs has been in the family since the early nineties and it came out of the cupboard again last month.

How it started

We spent a lot of summers in the south of France as a family. Somewhere along the way we ended up at a friend's table in Switzerland, and that was the first time I saw one of these.

The bit I remember as a boy was the bacon. She rubbed the little pans with it before anything else went in, seasoning them and getting the heat up, then went to throw the bacon away. We were horrified. We ate it. That is still the first thing I think of when the machine comes out.

The evening did what raclette evenings do. My parents bought one when we got home. We then spent years pushing it on other families, most of whom bought their own.

How we actually use it

Split. Always split.

Some occasions are a meat night, everything cooking on the plate across the top. Others are a cheese night, raclette melting in the pans underneath with potatoes and pickles. Never both at once. That was never a rule anyone wrote down, it just settled that way, and thirty years on it still holds.

The format is the point. There is no cook. Everyone builds their own pan, waits for it, scrapes it out, starts again. It stretches a meal across two hours without anyone doing any work. That is the whole trick and it has never stopped working.

Thirty years on

It functions absolutely perfectly.

There is no temperature dial. There is one red switch. It heats up, it stays hot, and it has done that reliably since the early nineties. The pans are still fine, the plate is still fine, the cable is still fine. It lives in its original box, which looks considerably worse than the machine does.

We get it out about twice a year now. It has never once failed to do its job.

For a piece of kitchen electronics from the nineties, that is remarkable. Almost nothing else we bought in that decade is still in the house, let alone still in service.

Buying one now

Tefal still makes these. The current round models are around 1100 watts with eight pans and eight spatulas, a removable dishwasher safe plate, and a Thermospot indicator that turns red when the plate is up to temperature. Rectangular versions go up to 1350 watts and ten pans. Whole and AllGalaxus

I would still take a round one. It puts everybody the same distance from the middle, which is the entire social argument for raclette. A rectangle leaves two people marooned at the ends.

The real obstacle in Britain

Not the machine. The shopping.

Raclette cheese has finally started appearing in UK supermarkets, which was not true for most of the time we have owned this. For years it meant a cheese market or a very upmarket supermarket, and often it meant not bothering.

Thin sliced cured meats are still the harder half. What you want is the properly thin French and Swiss style slices, and UK supermarket charcuterie packs are not really the same thing. A deli counter or an Italian grocer solves it. Potatoes, tomatoes, cornichons and grapes are the easy part.

Verdict

Five stars out of five. Thirty years of use, twice a year, and it still works exactly as it did on day one.

There is not much more to say about a product than that. It has outlasted every other appliance we have owned, it needs no maintenance, and the meal it produces is still the most relaxed way to feed eight people that I know of. Buy one, keep it in the loft, get it out twice a year, and hand it to your kids.

Family owned since the early nineties. Photographed in use, August 2026.