Meal #22 - Mongolia

The mongol hordes of Genghis Khan gave no quarter, nor did they expect any in return. Which is just as well, as after our meal at “The Khan” we’re not feeling particularly merciful. Yaaaaaaargh!

The Khan
Mongolian BBQ
295 Exhibition Street, City

The Khan, named in honour of Mongolia’s medieval poster boy you-know-who, offers what is claims is a traditional Mongolian “Victory Feast”, a barbecue of meat and spices fried on a Mongolian shield. This is apparently a cooking style passed down from the fierce warriors of Central Asia, who after a battle used to go hunting and cook the meat of the slaughtered beast on their iron war-shields over the campfires, or the embers of the burning villages or something. Hopefully they cleaned their shields in between the battle and the cook-up but who knows with those crazy medieval Mongols!!?

Anyway, the historical veracity of all this isn’t worth questioning. We just wanted to see if it tasted good. So on Saturday a small horde of ravenous diners descended on the Khan. Our vanguard included fierce food critics such as Savage Sai, Rapacious Rami, Dom the Dominator, Hell-bent Helen, Calamitous Caroline, Rampaging Ruvinda, Marty the Marauder and Nasty Nick.


What we found was a slightly down-at-heel dining hall decorated with pictures of the Great Khan himself, huge portraits of horsemen stirring up dust on the Asian steppes and a couple of fake swords straight from a Dungeons and Dragons memorabilia store. It was staffed seemingly by only two people, one tired guy explaining how it all worked and making an effort at table service, and one lacklustre guy doing the cooking. Genghis’ armies were said to be so efficient that his enemies were convinced their work was that of vast hordes, rather than the small elite killing squads they were. The cooking style may have been passed down since the Khan’s time, but this ruthless efficiency hadn’t.

The Meal.

This is the deal. It costs you twenty bucks, all you can eat, with an extra dollar each for “Mongolian tea”. Which was just garden variety green tea by the way, not in fact the salty milk and rice teas traditional in Mongolia.

First you can collect entrees from a bain marie. These included spring rolls, fried noodles, chicken wings and various other fried fare, not all of it instantly identifiable. By the time we got there, most of the food had been pillaged by other marauding diners and the trays weren’t restocked very often. There was a pot of chicken and corn soup, which was lukewarm and floury.


Ah well, maybe they don’t do entrees in Mongolia. Genghis Khan certainly never mucked around with pleasantries. Straight to the meat! Yaaargh!

Meat was what it was all about. There were four species of beast on offer – lamb, beef, chicken and pork. With a bowl and a pair of tongs you took your selection of any or all of these from a chilled cabinet. Then you added vegetables – from a choice of bean sprouts, capsicum, celery, onion, shallots, carrot and cabbage.


Following this was a row of sauce tubs, each with a serving spoon and a recommendation for how much to add. These included soy sauce, ginger water, sugar water, plain water, cooking wine, vinegar, sesame oil, shrimp oil and garlic. All are supposed to go in to get “the full taste of Mongolian barbecue.” Then there was mild or hot chilli.

You took your selection to the glassed-off cooking area and handed your bowl through the slot to the chef. If he’d wandered off, you rang the bell.


Then he cooked it on the “shield”. This was a big black hotplate, convex in shape so sizzling sauce and driplets of meat fall onto the floor as the cook stirs it with his long chopsticks. At the end, he would deftly fling the meat back into your bowl with the chopsticks and hand it to you through another slot. You could then further drown the meat in black bean, sweet and sour or “special Mongolian” sauce, or sprinkle it with sesame seeds or crushed nuts.


That was it. Tough luck if you didn’t want meat, or if you were on a kosher diet and maybe didn’t want your lamb being cooked in someone else’s pork juices and shrimp oil. What’s good for the Khan’s good for you, buddy! Admittedly you could mix and match the meats or play with the amount of garlic or chilli you put in– none of which made any difference, as whatever you did it always came out tasting like smokey, slightly burnt stir fry.


The Verdict.

While the Mongolian barbecue is definitely a different kind of dining experience it felt, well, dated and pointless. The all-you-can-eat vegetarians-can-go-to-hell meat-fest felt like something from the 80s, more than modern Melbourne, and the thrill of choosing your meat, spooning on your sauces and watch it sizzle on the pan is not that exotic or thrilling to people who cook stir fries at home, which these days is just about everybody. Okay the pan’s a funny shape and some of it ends up on the floor – so it’s like cooking a stir fry in a share house. Big yee-ha.


The spiel on the front of the drinks list was at pains to describe how traditional the whole process was. How the hotplate was designed to replicate the original shape and metal of the shields, how the Mongol warriors had once cooked with thin tree branches (“a kind of Mongolian chopstick”), now replaced with actual chopsticks. Even the frozen meat was apparently traditional – “the frozen plateau lands of central Asia are now our refrigerated selection cabinets.” Oh puh-lease!

A bit of research puts the lie to it. Yes, Mongol warriors did use their shields as fry-pans but the “Mongol barbecue” is a modern device based on Teppanyaki and appears to have originated in America. Traditional Mongolian cooking should involve things like mutton or goat meat, dumplings and rice stews. We accept that maybe roast marmots, the most famous Mongol delicacy, are not easy to come by but the main thing that distinguishes Mongol cooking from other Asian cuisine is the greater use of dairy, with curds and cheeses and yogurts not featured elsewhere in Asia, or at the Khan for that matter. The “Mongolian barbecue” is a glorified stir fry, however many swords and horsemen pictures you hang up.

Three things could have made the experience more bearable. One, better quality meat. It was quite ordinary, the beef and lamb in particular as tough as saddle leather. Two, more emphasis on the actual process of cooking, given that it is the highlight of the whole charade. Mongolian barbecue, like Teppanyaki, is basically theatre with a sizzling pan and extravagant chefs. The Khan lacks this, with the cooking going on at lazy pace in a glass walled room while people dutifully line up, hand their bowls through one slot and then pick them up at the other, with all the flair and drama of a school canteen. The third, of course, would have been to lighten the load on our wallets. At twenty-one bucks a pop, we all left feeling looted.

Anyway, it’s there, and they do the cooking on the “shield” thing and you can mix and match your meat and slop your sauce on it and watch it sizzle and if that does it for you, then they’ll be happy to take your money. Just don’t raise your expectations, because the Khan will raze them.


Links to some Mongol Food Sites:

Mongol Recipes:
http://www.mongolfood.info/en/

Wiki Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_cuisine

Notes from someone living in Mongolia:
http://www.rahul.net/dold/mongfood.htm

And the official word from a Mongolian tourist information hub:
http://www.ub-mongolia.mn/facts-for-the-visitors/customs-traditions-mongolia/a-little-about-mongolian-cuisine.html