Khan's Mongolian Barbecue, 500 E 78th St, Minneapolis

Submitted by reeses on Tue, 2003-12-16 17:01. | restaurants

I'd never had mongolian barbecue before. The idea of piling up a bunch of meat in a bowl, taking it to some guy who throws it on a big hot-table and stirs it around, and then scoops it into another (I hope) bowl -- it ain't my cup of meat.

But, Choadbite said that it didn't suck completely, and that this place, Khan's, was "tolerable".

After last night, I know that if he had to, he could eat the raw ass of a german shepherd and call it tolerable. That's not a rimming reference.

Let's start with the smell of the place. Actually, let's not, because it's too nasty.

Let's start with the shaved meat. This was one thing that was pretty cool. You went up to this demon's salad bar, and chose from big containers of shaved sheets of frozen meat. It was bizarre to see the crisp rolls of lamb, pork, beef, almost as if it was cuisine a` la Damien Hirst.

I went through once, modestly piling up a little lamb, a little pork, a little beef, chinese cabbage, pineapple (!!), vermicelli, chinese parsley, and sliced mushrooms into my little bowl. Topped with a little "ginger water", it was ready to go. The cooks threw it on the hot table, dumped something from a teapot (their "special sauce", according to a sign) onto it, and stirred it around with cooking chopsticks for a minute or so. Then, they swept it off onto a place and handed it back to me with a paper towel.

Bleaugh.

According to Choadbite, I didn't use enough sauce, that the secret of mongolian barbecue is in the proper and prodigious application of sauce, but that the local sauce selection was too watery to help anyway. I choked down my cheap meat and made one more pass, with an eye to globbing on lots of sauce.

It didn't help.

Looking for the proper name and address of this place, I saw scores of declarations that this was their favorite restaurant. They offered lots of advice such as,"Always get the peanuts," referring to the option of having peanuts added to your pile of frying food on the hot table.

The peanuts are not so good, which should have informed me as to the reliability of the rest of the advice, and the ministrations of love for the cuisine.

If you just like eating meat to eat meat, and don't really care about the taste, this might be the place for you. It really would be possible to eat pounds of stir-fried meat for $12 or so, but you're not going to have a positive taste experience.

For all-you-can-eat, I'll stick with Indian.

Bookmark/Search this post with: