By BlueZero
07 Apr 2011 06:13
With our stomachs growling, we decided to forgo our search of the French eatery and settle with the nearby mall food. I decided I didn't want to go to a familiar chain restaurant after driving so far and the other mall food outlets were uninteresting, so my friend choose Great Khan's Mongolian Festival. Let me breakdown this self-serve Mongolian BBQ:
Background: I unexpectedly ended up in Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego about two weeks ago. I was driving a friend down to the San Marcos area to interview with a grad school and I figured I might as well go a little more south to the city. As I looked for parking, she used her cell phone to lookup potential places to eat. We ended up walking around the area going past the local Hooters and stopped at Horton Plaza. Our hunger level was off the chart during the unsettling span between lunch and dinner. We were originally looking for a French restaurant around Horton Plaza but my friend's phone GPS kept leading us in circles. This was my first time going to Great Khan's Mongolian Festival and while I was writing this review I learned it was also a chain restaurant.
Ambiance: The first thing you will notice is the exaggerated Mongolian face on their restaurant sign. Secondly, you will notice the inside is extremely small since it's not a sit-down restaurant. The place is setup like a hexagonal food counter where you pay on the left side and work your way around the outside filling your bowl with meat and vegetables. At the end of the line, there are people cooking your bowl contents on an open circular slab with large chop-stick looking tools. Since there is no seating directly inside, we sat outside in the beautiful San Diego sun.
Food: This review is going to be even more subjective than normal due to the nature of choosing the ingredients to add to your bowl. It's just you and your ability to fill a bowl standing between you and your food. I of course wanted and always want to get the best value from my food so I made sure I packed my bowl skyhigh with everything I wanted. This means I picked things I know and I liked over trying everything.
We each paid for the default Mongolian BBQ entree without the extras of rice and soup. I had to choose from chicken, pork, turkey and beef so I went with about 95% beef and 5% turkey. My mindset was chicken is very cheap to buy, the pork looked uninspired, I wanted a lot of beef and turkey was unexpected so I added it to taste. Their website and other locations seem to also use lamb instead of turkey or perhaps rotate based on availability. I flattened the meat down in the bottom of the bowl with the tongs and added more meat to my friend's bowl since she didn't get enough beef.
Moving to the veggie section, I mainly focused on adding tomatoes since I really enjoy them. Vegetables are always the minor hero of BBQ dishes and this is no different. I also added a small amount of broccoli, bell peppers and mushrooms.
When it came to the sauce area, I couldn't understand what the guy behind the counter was asking me specifically about spice since he was mumbling. So I told him to make it spicy and believe he used all the sauces. He next dumped a good serving on noodles on my heaping bowl of ingredients and added it to the cooking queue.
While my food was being cooked, I made sure to pour out some of the Asian red spice sauce (Sriracha) into a mini-cup. Sriracha always makes food taste better and I enjoy spicy food. About this time my food was ready and they put it in a white takeout container (not a stereotypical Chinese box though).
Oh yeah take a really close look at my creation
Taste: I really enjoyed the overall package. The meat was very thin uncooked and the cooked texture and flavor were muted. The beef and turkey could not stand out on its own which is disappointing for a Mongolian BBQ food joint. With my huge appetite it tasted good while if I were only peckish, I would have been more dissatisfied paying ~$8 to $9 for just the meat.
The vegetables were able to bring a lot of flavor to the dish. I had to restrain from eating all the yummy tomatoes and eat them together with the meat. The noodles were also the best part of the dish as they were not too oily and fully cooked. I could not taste any of the sauces in the dish or maybe all the sauces were absorbed into the tasty noodles.
Pictures of my friend's food:
