Maybe it was made with mare’s milk. 
The confusion might be terminology – in all the Mongolian restaurants I’ve been to, you choose your own combination of raw ingredients and sauces (which might be what people mean by “making it yourself”), but you hand it off to a cook who grills it on a round gas-heated grill using long wooden or bamboo sticks (I’ve never seen metal used), scrapes it off into your bowl, and gives it to you.
I’ve had shabu-shabu. That’s completely different. Kinda like Japanese fondue, only using hot water.
Cal’s right. but it’s up to YOU to pick a resonable combination of ingredients, and they will always invariably cook the snot out of your meal. (some people may like snot in their food, I dunno.)
Between the thorough cooking and the mincing action of the jumbo chopsticks, stuff can easily come put looking and tasting the same.
The ones I’ve been to have been in mall food courts. Considering the alternatives, the Mongolian BBQ places had plentiful and reasonably good food for a good price. Not gourmet, but beats the crap out of McDonalds.
I’ve been to a really interesting Korean buffet, where you got to pick meat and vegetables from a buffet and cook it for yourself at a grill on your table. Now that is truly cook it yourself. Years ago I went to a steak place in Illinois where you selected your cut of meat and cooked it yourself on an open barbecue grill.
There are also hot pot places, where you cook your meat in hot water, making a soup stock while you do it.
I’ve only been to one Mongolian grill: **The Green Bowl **in State College, PA. Anyone know if it’s still there? When I haunted it (1999-2001) it was fresh, clean, delish, good atmosphere…plenty good stuff. Not sure why I’ve not tried a Mongolian grill since…maybe because the one on Broadway looks so…unwelcoming.
Wow, small world! I grew up north of there, off of Irvine Ave, just south of the s-curves. Heck, Anaheim isn’t that far away…
Very tasty, consistently good and low-priced, for the almost 25 years that I’ve been eating there.
I pity the rest of you…
Edmonton used to have a restaraunt called the Mongolian Food Experience. It was absolutely awesome. Then the city shut them down for health violations. They opened up a new one, which was just as good. Then the city shut them down again. That was the end of them.
Since then, various Mongolian barbecue places have opened, and they’re all a pale imitation of the original.
In Atlanta, we have Chow Baby, which is an excellent Mongolian Grill style restaurant. The quality of such places hinges heavily on the hygiene of the grills, the hygiene of the ingredient stalls/bins/containers, and the quality of the ingredients.
I had a wonderful experience at Genghis Khans Mongolian Barbecue in Brighton (UK). It was the next-to-last evening on a 2-week visit to Great Britian. On my birthday, no less. Great food, great memories.
It was a drag, though, to be denied admission to a club later in the evening. They didn’t allow anyone wearing “runners”!
A 400-degree grill is pretty hygenic 
My family dragged me along to the Wok-a-bout Grill here in Wenatchee, WA a couple years ago. Despite being a darn good professional cook myself, and being able to pick good combinations of flavors, I was overwhelmed by the blandness of the food once the cook was finished with it. I’m afraid I haven’t been back.
Hmmmm, I just googled up some reviews, and there are some that are, shall I say, rather off-putting? Oh well, I was there back in '87, and it was good then… 
Small world! Chow Baby was started and is owned by my therapist’s son!
That would be the Executive Chef/Co-Owner? Nice guy. My sauces frighten him, and he’s trained, so I know that they’re scary.
I amuse them by bringing in my own sauce kit, which has yielded variable results. I invariably create these high-heat sauces. Early experiments with Wasabe didn’t pan out, since it loses it in high heat. Put cayenne pepper in a citrus base, though, and you get something that heats up with heat. More Thai than Mongolian.
And why were you wearing a long, narrow carpet made for use in corridors on your birthday? And why couldn’t you remove it?
I think the problem with Mongolian grills is that they take a little practice. You’re unlikely to make something really outstanding on your first try.
I’m a big eater, so I kept returning to Ruzhen in Seattle’s University District just because I love all-you-can-eat. Eventually I was making better combinations than I’d gotten with my first couple of tries.
I usually have two plates when I go there. On the first one, I try to concentrate on seafoods, with maybe a bit of poultry added. You need to be sure to add some salt water to your bowls, to bring out all the flavors, and pick a nice oil as well. I often see people avoid the oil, and their food sticks to the grill and gets somewhat charred. Then be choosy on other sauces–it’s easy to blend too many and end up with muddled flavor.
My second plate is more like a half plate (I’m not as big an eater as I once was), and I go for the beef and pork on that one.
In short, the tendency is to get some of everything, and that will of course lead to food that tastes like too much stuff mixed together. If you concentrate on fewer things, you get a more specific meal, which I like better.
That’s good advice. I’ll try that next time I get Mongolian BBQ, because I do usually just get a mixture of everything.
The way I see it, Mongolian BBQ is cheap, fast, and reliable. And it’s better than McDonald’s. You’re never going to go to a 5 star Mongolian BBQ restaurant (unless they’re primarily other things- Santa Cruz has a swanky French restaurant that apparently also offers Mongolian BBQ, although I’ve never had it), but it’s basically just fast food on a big circular grill thing.
All the Mongolian BBQs I’ve been to cook the food too long by about twice. That and the “chefs” usually pour water over it to keep it from sticking and generally mash the fuck out of it with their spatulas.
I love stir fry, just not the way they do it at the Mongolian BBQ joints.
Back in Austin, I used to enjoy the various Mongolian BBQs. If I had a bad meal there, it was pretty much my own fault, and over the years I’d really figured out what I liked on my stirfry.
Here, though- there’s one Mongolian BBQ joint. And in this place, they pour water all over the food to keep it from sticking- which completely washes away all the sauces I so carefully select and mix. The end result is a tasteless mash of boiled meat and vegetables.
I went there once, and I’ll never go again. If I want tasteless, boiled food, I can do that at home for much cheaper.
Can you recommend a good one in Austin? I have one I like in Dallas, but not Austin.
Do you guys mean that they pour water over the food while it’s cooking? How bizarre- I have never seen that! How gross.
At Pan Asia, it’s just my food and my sauces on my own little part of the grill!