Erin and I went out to “The Mongolian Grill” for the first time last night. It was pretty good. Though it’s not a new concept, it it a unique restaurant here in Saskatoon (as far as I know) so it was an interesting experience.

To kind of fill you in on how it works - they’ve got a buffet bar with fresh veggies and raw meat - beef, pork, chicken, shrimp, fish, tofu. You take a bowl, fill it with whatever combination of stuff you want, top it off with a combination of some of the 15 sauces, and then hand it to the chef. They cook it up for you, and bring it to your table. Apparently you used to have to pay by weight for your food, which penalizes the bok choy and water chesnut fans of the world for all that water weight, but now it’s “All you can eat” for $14. I made two trips to the buffet, to try out a couple of different sauce combinations. The only caveat is that they’ll charge you $7 if you waste too much food, which is to discourage getting stupid with your last platefull.

I thought it was kind of neat - they give you a bowl of soup to start, and some rice with your meal, then you can just keep going up and giving the chef more stuff to cook as often as you want. The one thing that might have made it a little better would be maybe some sauce combination suggestions. The one that I liked the best was two scoops of ginger sauce and two scoops of sweet & sour sauce.

I figure there are around 4,398,046,511,104 different possible combinations of stirfry, and that’s not even taking proportions into consideration. :-)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Come see Bottomless Pete, nature’s cruelest mistake.” - Captain McAllister