Hestan - SmartChef Series - Induction Burner, Portable Electric Cooktop with Temperature Control, Kitchen Induction Cookware (Burner)

First, the pros: cooking with video guidance on a screen and auto precision temperature control is definitely the future. For beginners, cooking will feel like a no brainer. For experienced chefs, you will become more adventurous and confident at trying new hard recipe——-the new recipe success rate is much higher compared to old ways of cooking.Cons: This is not the company that’s going to push smart cooking to main stream! They have the wrong incentives. Their smart cooktop doesn’t work with other brands of pans. So basically, you have to buy their whole stack of pans, sauce pans and pots. Adding the sold separately smart thermometer, the entire system is costing above $1000. Ok maybe that’s fine, given it’s still relatively new. But the user experience is terrible. The cooktop, the pan and the mobile app need Bluetooth pairing every time and sometimes it wouldn’t work at all. And for days, you wouldn’t be able to cook with it. Besides, that the quality of the cooktop is disappointing at a price of $200. I did some research and found out it’s built based on the same $100-50 cheapo induction cooktop on Amazon. It is advertised as precision cooking. But the temperature control would occasionally overshoot 60F and burn the food...In conclusion: avoid this company at all cost. Their customer service is non exist..Also don’t consider Breville Control Freak cooktop which is great at manual temp control but is not smart/no WiFi built in.( Very pricey, given its limited features) Had one, sold it.On the other hand, I’m more excited by some of these new companies, such as KitchenAutomatique, Typhur and a few others. Keep an eye on them!

...and your expensive ingredients - directly to the compost pile. The Cue series guided recipes cannot be used without authenticating yourself to the company - which means, no Internet-no food! Moreover, a recipe will abort in the middle if you somehow lose your authenticated status. For example, that happens if the application crashes or locks up, forcing you to restart it, while the company's server cannot be contacted for whatever reason - loss of Internet or (far more often) just a server malfunction.At that point, your guidance is terminated, and you have to at best continue cooking without the benefit of controlled (or even measured) temperature, and at worst throw away the half-cooked meal and look for other sources of food for your family.Don't expect for Hestan to own up to its infrastructure malfunctions though - it will keep blaming you and only you, from deceptively stating that the app is not authorized to use Bluetooth (as if somehow iOS randomly takes away privileges from apps), to the ridiculous "your network connection isn't strong enough" (see picture). I wonder, how much "stronger" does my Gigabit connection need to be? Bottom line, no food for you until Hestan decides to fix their server. Why they made the decision to deny use of the device in case of Internet outage instead of giving their customers the benefit of the doubt (or doing away with the Orwellian "you must identify yourself to cook" rule altogether) is beyond me.Well, maybe the software is unreliable, but at least the cookware is good, right? Not quite. The "dishwasher safe", claim is quite dubious: I've had the non-stick coating of the pan peeling off at the edges after a few washes, and water leaking into the supposedly water-tight parts of the stainless steel version. Hestan did replace the units under warranty, but now that the warranty has expired, I'm scared to even look at the dishwasher.Don't get me wrong: when it works, the Cue system is great. But the sense of playing a food lottery every time you set to cook dinner wears you down over time. Better wait for the PolyScience Control Freak to go on sale, or start with one of the much cheaper alternatives to see how the whole concept of temperature control works for you, instead of getting burned with Hestan's expensive, yet unreliable system.UPDATE: Taking off a star, because the multi-day service outages are now happening almost every month. It seems Hestan wants to profit from extracting and selling customer data like the big guys, but is unwilling or incapable of fixing outages within minutes or (at worst) hours like, say, Google or Facebook. To make things worse, there is zero communication: the only way to find out if the company has finally managed to fix the outage and your expensive appliances are once again usable is to keep trying - a frustrating and unpleasant process, exacerbated by the continuous false accusations that your "weak network' is the root of the problem.

Avoid this company like the plague! They have the absolute worst customer service and after sales support I have ever seen. They have a customer service phone number that has only worked one time in several weeks of trying to deal with them. Other than that, you have to use a support ticket on their website which is also a joke.I spent almost $800 on the set with the burner. Right out of the box, the burner would not update via the software. It took me several tries of force closing the app and retrying to update. Finally it went through. Then onto the pots/pan. The app has to discover each one of them. I was able to get all of them connected EXCEPT for the 5.5qt pan(the largest of the set). I tried everything they suggested on their troubleshooting and in the end it didn't work. So I try to call and their number doesn't work. Imagine that. I try again several times over the next day and still nothing. So I file a support ticket. They tell me they are going to get ahold of their tech team to diagnose the problem. I told them I wanted a new pan since this one was obviously faulty right out of the box. Almost a week later I hadn't heard back so I email again. Didn't hear back so I try the number and it works, once. I happen to get the same person I've been dealing with through email which I thought was a little weird but ok. We go back and forth on sending me a new pot and finally after "checking and making the decision" she agrees to send a new one. We hang up and I get an email with a return label. I wait for an email with tracking thinking they were sending out a new one to make things right. Well another almost week later, nothing. So I respond to the email asking where the new one is so I can repackage the faulty one and send it back. She says they have to get the old one back and inspect it before they send a new one. What a joke. I could understand if I've had it a year and maybe it was a warranty claim, but brand new $800 faulty product out the box??? If I have this much trouble trying to get them to take care of a brand new faulty product, I can't even imagine when one of the sensors goes bad and I have to file a warranty claim. I will never spend another dime with this company and I recommend to stay far away from them. Spend your hard earned money with a more reputable company.