AD - Gifted. Garden Kitchen is a BRAND NEW TOY from Smoby which helps bring imaginative play to life. Budding cooks can copy their parents and cook up a (pretend) feast with this garden toy. Garden Kitchen has a plancha (which is apparently a flat topped griddle), a grill, a fryer and lots of accessories and play food. It will keep your children entertained for ages. We received ours to review so here is what we liked and didn't like about Smoby's Garden Kitchen.

Garden Kitchen by Smoby is a great toy for imaginative play inside or out

Review of Smoby's Garden Kitchen 

Some of the great features of the Garden Kitchen toy: 

-You can have it inside or outside, but the anti-UV treatment should help ensure the colours stay bright and fresh in your garden for years.

-The wheels and light plastic design allow it to be moved around easily.

-The kitchen is height adjustable by 6 cm so you can have it on the lower settings if you have a 3 year old or the higher setting for taller children. I have it set up on the higher setting.

-It has a working tap which is great for washing the salad leaves or little hands after you touch the raw (plastic) meat. The tap works by you pushing the top of it a few times to pump water up. There is a tube from the plug hole which feeds the tap so the water circulates around without the need to add more.

-The flames on the grill go up and down as you adjust the temperature with the knob.

-It comes with loads of accessories including a burger that stacks together, meat and veg to put onto a kebab skewer, a lighter for the grill which clicks, tongs to turn the hot food and salt and pepper grinders that click as you turn them.

Cook a burger, kebab or fry some chips in this Garden Kitchen

There is great attention to detail and even a working tap!

What I Love About The Smoby Garden Kitchen

A huge amount of thought has obviously gone into the design of the Garden Kitchen to make it as playable with as possible. It is big enough that my 3 and 6 year old can play on it together happily. Features like the tongs and spatula allow children to get used to how to use these tools in a safe way before they are old enough to use real tools on heat.

The accessories help children learn real cooking skills like how to use tongs

The play kitchen is big enough that siblings or friends can play together

There are 3 ways to cook with a plancha (flat griddle), grill and fryer

Assembling The Smoby Garden Kitchen - The Worst Bit

The kitchen arrives in a box and needs to be assembled. There is a lot of plastic pieces and a sticker sheet too. The instructions suggests it will take an hour and a half to put together, but it took me slightly longer than that thanks to the help of my 3 year old who kept moving all the pieces I was looking for. My advice is put it together when your children aren't around and it will be far quicker! 

Most of it was really easy to put together. Having assembled both wooden and plastic role play toys from several manufacturers in the past I liked that nothing in the Smoby set up required a lot of force or strength. The instructions are pictorial and easy to follow, although I found the tap a little confusing to assemble and it took me a while to put the grill lid on so it would stay attached.

Lots of the larger pieces are attached together with plastic from the moulding process and need separating which was probably the hardest bit. While you can use scissors, to get a flat surface (without any sharp bits children can catch themselves on) you ideally need to use a blade or Stanley knife, but obviously you need to be very careful with this. 

The kitchen needs assembling before play, my preschooler was not much help

Suitable for children age 3 plus the kitchen has an adjustable height

What You Get With The Smoby Garden Kitchen

All the smaller parts are in brown paper bags in the box. The accessories for the kitchen are: tongs, spatula, prongs, a lighter, a plastic bowl, a chopping board, a kitchen knife, 2 plastic glasses, 2 plastic plates, 2 sets of cutlery and 3 pots you can grow herbs in (we are currently using these to keep the cutlery in). You also get play food: chips, a burger (which comes apart into the bun, burger, tomatoes and cheese), a kebab skewer and food to go on it, 2 sausages, some lettuce and salt and pepper grinders, mustard and BBQ sauce bottles. There is so much included that it's a shame there isn't storage included to keep everything together, but you can probably get most of it under the grill lid and on the shelf if you aren't going to play with it for a while.

There are lots of accessories which makes imaginative play last for hours

You can remove the kebab pieces from the skewer

One of the dials on the front adjusts the flames on the grill so they can go up or down

Buying the Smoby Garden Kitchen

The Garden Kitchen toy is suitable from age 3. I think the ideal age range is 3 to 6 years, but my 10 year old was keen to have a play as well so the appeal definitely lasts longer. You can buy it now from Selfridges and Amazon.

 

The assembled Smoby Garden Kitchen received to review