Someone wrote: >I just noticed a restaurant called Fire and Ice in Church St. on >Harvard Square, in the building with Cafe Fiorella and Brew Moon in >the space where that Chinese restaurant used to be. Anybody know >anything about it? I didn't see a menu outside (it was the morning, >before it opened), so I couldn't investigate too much. I was there for lunch the other day. They offer a bunch of ingredients for grilling together: Meats included sirloin tips, chicken breast pieces, scallops, calamari, and pork pieces; this may vary, as another diner seemed surprised to not see lamb. Veggies included white and portobello mushrooms, peppers, zucchini, tempeh, broccoli, garlic, onion, scallion, carrot, sprouts, and some other things I've forgotten. There were about ten sauces, including some barbecue, some curry, teriyaki, black bean, and jerk sauce. The sauces were of varying levels of hotness (though my three-star "Fire and Ice barbecue sauce" was noticably warm, I wouldn't have called it *hot*...). You get a cute little plastic palette with spaces for two bowls, one for the grilling stuff and one for the sauce. After filling the bowls at the salad-bar-like counters (many items were duplicates - this may lead to less crowding, but if the diner is confused and goes to all the counters, the parallelism is wasted), you take the palette up to the round grill in the center of the room, where a cook grills it all together. By the time you get back to your seat, the waitress has brought a clever little container with tortillas on the top (four for two people wasn't quite enough) and veggie-adulterated rice on the bottom. In addition to the grill dish, you also get a salad, a choice of three: caesar, spinach, and mixed greens (dressings on the side). A nice touch: you can choose between one grill and salad for $8 or all you can eat for $12 (prices from memory), but you don't have to choose at the start; you either only eat one, or you go back for lots, and the waitress (presumably) figures out which to charge you for. Everything was very fresh, and the variety of sauces was nice. The spinach salad had walnuts and snow peas in it, which I thought was neat. The decor was a little funky for my taste (I'm just not that into painted corrugated metal...). In general, it was tasty and fun, though it may not be for everyone - if your intent in going out to eat is to get something you can't cook at home, and you do any amount of stir-frying, you may think "why bother coming here, I could do this myself at home." Alternately, if you don't have much sense for what goes well together, your results may not be the best (or, as my dining companion put it, "Hmm, this is a really odd combination"). The menu implied the existence of recipe cards, which presumably had some suggested ingredient-and-sauce combinations, but I didn't find any. At any rate, I'm planning to go back some time when I'm starving to death and try all the sauces. :) -Laura Baldwin [email removed]
Boston, MA
Fire and Ice (Church St. in Harvard Square)
HBalmat wrote: >>david carlton wrote: >>I just noticed a restaurant called Fire and Ice in Church St. on >I just saw that, too. We went in to check out the menu, and found little >flyers that explained that there *is* no menu. My friend said he thought >it must be similar to this "mongolian barbeque" place he knows in DC where >you fill your own bowl with all sorts of random ingredients, hand it to the >chefs, and they cook it for you. No menus involved. It was written up recently in the Boston Globe (not a review, just a news item, probably in Alison Arnett's A La Carte column, which appears Wednesdays in the Food section). The article suggested that this "interactive dining concept" was a hot NEW trend in restaurants--and all I could think of was Mongolian BBQ, which has been around forever, though not, unfortunately, in Boston. I guess it is "new" in the same way that "wraps" are new, instead of being "burritos" or "rollups." It is supposed to be similar to Mongolian BBQ, but with yuppified, non-Asian ingredients, if I recall correctly. The basic idea is that you pick ingredients and sauces from a buffet, hand the bowl to one of the chefs, and he cooks it for you on a huge flat- topped grill. He will usually add some liquid if it seems like you didn't add enough. You can have as much as you want at one time, as long as it fits in to the bowl. I can't remember if Fire and Ice was all-you-can-eat all the time, but I recall that the article said that it was at dinnertime at least. At Tony Cheng's Mongolian Barbecue (probably the one your friend was thinking of in DC), the grill is the focus of the room--it is out in the center of the eating area. There is a bit of show involved in the cooking. Tipping the chef is encouraged, but not mandatory. If you do, he is likely to take more care with your food, and even give you suggestions on sauces next time through the line... In other Mongolian BBQ places I have visited, the grill is sometimes off to the side, or even in a separate kitchen. Not as much fun. But few Chinese restaurant owners have the flair of Tony Cheng-- in my experience, his restaurants (in the Baltimore and DC area) have stood out in the areas of decor and service, if not always for the food (which was always at least adequate). The downside of these types of places is that the quality of the food depends greatly on the skill of the diner--you choose the ingredients and sauces, so you are responsible for the taste. And there is some luck involved, since you don't know exactly how their versions of the sauces taste, unlike in your own kitchen, with your own sauces. Also, since all the ingredients are prepared in exactly the same way, quick grilling, there is an element of monotony after a while, even if you choose different ingredients and flavorings. Still, it can be a lot of fun to go to one of these places once in a while--at least the Mongolian BBQ (I'll reserve judgment on the westernized version). So when is Boston going to get a _real_ Mongolian BBQ? Heck, they even have some in the barren wilds of my former home state (WI). Marcel