Weird Kitchen Gadgets That Are Somehow Also Useful
Novelty kitchenware is mostly landfill. These are the ones that survive past January.
Almost all novelty kitchen gear fails the same test. It gets used once for a photograph, then lives at the back of a cupboard until a house move, at which point it goes in a charity bag. The problem is that the novelty and the function are two separate things bolted together, and the function is always the worse one.
The items that survive are the ones where the strange shape is also the working part. A dinosaur that steeps tea is a good infuser that happens to be a dinosaur. A taco holder shaped like a triceratops holds tacos at least as well as the plain wire ones do.
That's the filter applied here: would you still own this if it weren't funny? Everything below passes.
How we picked
Each item had to be a competent version of the tool it's imitating, not just a shaped object. Anything where the novelty actively made it worse at its job was cut.
Ceramic, holds three tacos upright in the saddle, and is heavy enough not to tip when you load it. The plain metal versions of this cost about the same and are considerably less enjoyable to put on a table.
The dinosaur perches on the mug rim and its body holds the leaves below the waterline. Genuinely easier to fill and empty than a ball infuser, which is the rare case of the novelty version being the better tool.
Nessie's humps break the surface while the head and body steep beneath. It looks as good in a mug as it does in the packaging, which almost nothing in this category manages.
A penguin-shaped rack that holds eggs for boiling and then lifts them straight into an ice bath as a unit. Solves the genuinely annoying problem of fishing hot eggs out of a pan one at a time, and the penguin part is incidental to it working.
Frogs that sit on glass rims to mark whose drink is whose. Reusable, unlosable, and considerably more pleasant than a sheet of stickers.
Convincing enough at arm's length to sit in a fruit bowl indefinitely. The payoff is watching someone commit to a bite. Not useful in any conventional sense, included because it's the best pure prank object in the kitchen category.
Genuinely bad to eat and genuinely great to give. The only item here that fails the usefulness test on purpose.
A sampler of sodas in flavours that read like a dare. Works best as a group activity rather than a solo drink, which makes it a better party gift than a personal one.
Frequently asked
Are novelty kitchen gadgets worth buying?
Only when the novelty shape is also the functional part. A dinosaur tea infuser works because the body is the basket; a novelty item that's merely decorated tends to be worse than the plain version and gets abandoned quickly.
What's a good kitchen gift for someone who cooks a lot?
Something they'd never buy for themselves but would use — the penguin egg cooker is the strongest pick here for an actual cook, because it solves a real irritation rather than adding another object to a full drawer.
What weird kitchen gadget makes the best gift under $20?
The triceratops taco holder and the Loch Ness infuser both land under $20 and both survive into regular use, which is the correct bar for a kitchen gift at that price.