About a month ago, I had Mongolian grill for lunch for the first time in years. The restaurant – not a bad one, so far as Mongolian grills go – smelled like grease when I walked in. The food was mediocre. Mental note: don’t go back to Chang’s.
Today, a coworker and I ended up trying a different Mongolian grill for lunch. And it was better – the air was fresher, for one thing. The vegetables were a little crisper, the sauces looked tastier, the options were a little more varied.
End result: a better lunch than the first, but still nothing special.
We discussed this on our way back to work, and further with some other coworkers. Consensus: Mongolian grill just isn’t going to produce great food. You select the meat, you select the veggies, you select the sauces, then it gets stir-fried while you watch. But for great food, there’s a chef involved who knows better than you do what flavors will go well together. There’s individualization, not just plopping everything on to a grill. Meat is marinated, vegetable proportions are balanced, sauces are concentrated and specially chosen.
My question: has anyone ever been truly dazzled by a Mongolian grill restaurant? Not just filled up or reasonably satisfied – my lunch today was certainly better than McDonald’s, for example. But I wasn’t impressed by the food, the atmosphere, or anything else that can make a restaurant great.
And if you’ve been to an amazing Mongolian grill, especially in the Seattle area, where is it?
I had the exact same reaction the two times I ate at the Mongolian Barbeque in Naperville, Ill.
I guess there is the novelty of choosing your own meats, spices etc. and then enjoying the scent and sizzle of your creation as it cooks before your eyes.
I have noticed each time though that most of the marinade immediately trickles into the little drain hole and that what you are left with is fried up bowl of glop that doesn’t offer much in the way of distinctive flavor.
I like Chang’s, or did the last time I was there, about 7 years ago. There’s a chain around the Boston area (and who knows where else) called Fire & Ice that I don’t like nearly as much. It took a couple of visits, but I figured out why. Chang’s lets you select oils to put on the food before cooking, and Fire & Ice has sauces to put on after the meat and veggies are cooked. The oils infuse the flavors a lot better. Maybe the OP would like it better the other way.
A Mongolian grill is what it is; simple, and done just the way you want. Trained chefs may know everything about marinating and blending flavors, but then they always want to dump lots of mushrooms or something in there, ick. I’ll take a good Mongolian grill when I can find it.
The place I went today offered oils and other sauces to add before cooking, and sauces to add after cooking. I deployed both.
That’s true of Burger King, as well, and sometimes that’s what I want. But I’d never describe either BK or the grill I went to today as great food, or anything much more than serviceable.
The best Mongolian BBQ, ever, is Pan Asia in Costa Mesa, CA. Owned and run by the same couple forever, their pictures are still up on the walls so I assume they have retired but still own it.
Has been consistently fantastic since I started eating there in about 1982…
I want to try it but never have. I almost ate at one once… we were impressed by the service, and they said that for vegetarians (like me) they had special cooking utensils that were never used on meat, and a totally separate grill, etc. I was looking forward to it… until we looked at the fork at our table. Dirty. Then we went up to get our dishes to put the veggies on, but the bowls were dirty. Every. Single. One. Some even had crusty sauce still on them in addition to just hard cooked on bits. We were disturbed enough by that to question the overall cleanliness of the restaurant and decided to leave without eating after all.
I used to live right behind that place! kaylasmom and I loved eating there. We’d walk through Pinkley Park from our home, and chow down on the yummy eats. We learned fairly quickly not to bother with the all-you-can-eat offer, because a single trip to the grill, along with the rice and those wonderful sesame pockets was quite satisfying.
They were pretty good sports about the guide dog, too.
I can’t speak to the authenticity, though. The pamphlets that hype the historical forebears of this type of restaurant always mention that the cooking was done on a warrior’s shield (so they didn’'t have to carry a stove into battle, I guess), and the grill at Pan Asia looks both too flat and too big around to be an actual shield. Also, except when they were campaigning in the middle of winter, I doubt that Genghis Khan’s armies had a lot of frozen meat on hand (carrying that into battle would seem to present even more obstacles than a stove ).
what do you expect? You have to make the food yourself, if you’re a good chef, then it will probably taste OK, but if not, it wont.
Its actually kind of amazing people go for that, what with grocery stores and readily available cooking equipment and supplies.
I always thought the point of a restaurant was to get some kind of food you couldnt make at home, something prepared by some kind of expert or process you couldnt duplicate in the average kitchen.
Well, the owner of the Mongolian BBQ in Michigan (B.D.'s mongolian BBQ) has opened up a franchise in China. My wife did an article on it.
So, you know, there’s atually a mongolian BBQ in the land of the mongols now. Or at least in the land of the people who eventually conquered the mongols.
I’ll agree you’re never going to get haute cuisine, o anything within lightb years of it at a Mongioliasn grill. But I like them. The fiood is good and nouriashing. And it’s fun.
My big complaint it that they’re damned hard to find in New England. I’ve eaten at them in Salt Lake City, and in East Brunswick and New Brunswick NJ, and in Boulder , CO. I’ve never seen one in New England, and I miss them.
Well, the whole selling point is that it simulates Mongol warriors cooking food on their shields; which is kind of puzzling, as you can’t really cook on leather.
(The Mongols, like just about everyone else, did not use metal shields).
Tip: go to a Mongolian grill where the cooks use wooden sticks/spatulas instead of metal ones. I went to a place in Calgary where they used metal ones and you wouldn’t believe the godawful racket we had to listen to the whole meal.
Yeah, I went to one last year and my reaction was pretty much a mirror of this.
I think the next logical step up from Mongolian BBQ is a place where you walk in, then they have you wander across the street to a grocery store, buy your own ingredients, take it back to your own place and cook it yourself. Then they bill you for the experience.
I don’t get it. Everyone’s talking about how you cook the food yourself in a Mongolian BBQ. I’ve never had this experience. Yeah, you do pick out all the ingredients you want and put 'em all together in a bowl, and you add on your choice of sauce (although it usually doesn’t matter too much what you put on, so long as you put on enough of it), but you’re not cooking it, the Mongolian BBQ chef does it for you. On a big circular grill! With huge chopsticks!
I love Mongolian BBQ because it always tastes good (again, it doesn’t really matter what sauces you put on because the chef puts in a good amount of stuff anyway) and it’s fun and usually very cheap. That’s about it. Sure, you can probably replicate a similar experience at home, but you don’t get the fun grill, or any of the sauces, and I sure as hell hate slicing my meat that thin.
Big Bowl has a mongolian barbecue but I don’t trust myself enough to get it. I prefer to just order off the menu since the rest of their stuff is so good.
I’m wondering if people are confusing this with sukiyaki or shabu shabu restaurants, where the diners are offered the oportunity to cook their own food. Those are Japanese restaurants, of course, and I have also eaten in a Korean restaurant with this type of arrangement. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a Chinese restaurant with DIY cooking.
Alternatively, they may be considering Mongolian barbecue to amount to “doing your own cookng” because the diner is making the choices as to what ingredients and seasonings will be used.
