Gabriel S.
Yelp
There's nothing Mongolian about Mongolian Barbecue, which is what this place serves up (it's from Taiwan) but it's still pretty decent.
You choose various ingredients and sauces, and they'll be grilled for you. It's all you can eat too. Due to covid-19 there've been some changes - you no longer fill the bowls of stuff to cook yourself, but fill out a sheet of paper and someone will do it for you. This reduces your flexibility. For example you're limited to one protein per order. You can still ask for half portions (so you can try more combinations).
Although each bowl comes with a carb (rotini, chow mein or rice noodles), they give you rice and tortillas to eat your fryup with. When I ordered rotini or chow mein I got quite a lot of noodles, but rice noodles was a modest portion. This might be useful if you want to pace yourself.
Besides the Mongolian Barbecue, there's also a soup and salad bar, but I had to ask the server about it when I saw it on the way to the washroom. There were 2 soups (chicken noodle and vegetable), the usual salad components, potato salad and coleslaw. The soups were decent, and the potato salad and coleslaw were ok.
They have daily specials too. It was Friday and martinis were $7 (usual price $9.50). I had an El nino martini. It was decent - not dilute, though by no means strong.
Given the breadth of choices, not all combinations of flavours worked. Though you kind of only have yourself to blame, since you make all the decisions. I had 4 gos at it:
Shrimp with rice noodles, bean medley, water chestnut and bamboo shoots, fried with Shanghai and lemon sauces and topped with Mongolian spice, black pepper and mixed herbs was ok. The shrimp were pretty small, but the water chestnut was nice and crunchy and there was quite a lot of it.
Marinated beef with chow mein, minced garlic, bean sprouts and diced tomatoes fried with teriyaki and Mongolian Fire sauces, topped with beef spice, mixed herbs and parsley was pretty good. It was overly flavourful, though, possibly since the chow mein soaked up the sauces too well. There was also too much edamame and chow mein. This was the only order I cut with tortillas and rice.
Calamari, rotini, tofu, mushroom and edamame fried with szechuan and honey garlic sauces and topped with ginger, lemon pepper and seasoning salt didn't work so well. There was too much rotini and it was too soft. The tofu was a shade too soft for stir frying, and the calamari was a little limp (still okay, but not as firm and fresh as good calamari should be). The sauces were only alright.
Turkey sausage, rice noodles, onions, zucchini and diced tomatoes fried with BBQ and lemon sauces and spiced with cajun, oregano and basil worked the best of the 4. The flavours went well together and the ingredients complemented each other. The turkey sausage was much better than expected - it was really tasty.