Greg H. wrote: > Not exactly St. Charles... > > I've never been but it is in a shopping center at Olive and 1-41 > (Northwest Corner). Actually, the shopping center has been built in parts > and the section with this restaurant is a little west of the intersection. > For those of you who it might help...the location used to be a Pasta > House, a Brett Hull's, a Red, Hot & Blue and now the Mongolian BBQ. Pardon the rambling introduction...sometimes I get off on a tangent. (Well, at least people who read newsgroups are likely to understand some of the feeble jokes.) Anyway, here's my recent article on the place (copyright 1997 Hartmann Publishing Inc. and Joe Bonwich, blah, blah, blah): HORDE FEAST Mongolian BBQ & International Buffet 100 Four Seasons Center (Olive and 141, Chesterfield) 878-1998 Hours: Lunch, daily, 11:30-2:30; Dinner, 5-9 p.m. Su-Th; till 9:30 F-Sa All you can eat: $9.95 Su-Th; $12.95 F-Sa At my day job, I sit upstairs from a bunch of incredibly brilliant folks who spend their days out on the bleeding edge of technology designing object-oriented client/server computer systems – precisely the kind of jobs everyone has been making such a big to-do about with the Peirce Report, St. Louis 2004 and all the other chatter that’s been going on about the future of our beloved city. Anyway, during my academic days, there was a saying that a mathematician is a machine that turns coffee into theorems. Out here in the real world, or at least the virtual real world, that translates into a programmer being a machine that turns buffet lines into code. I write this prologue because one of said wizards approached me some weeks ago to rave about a new restaurant that he’d discovered out near Olive and 141, one with the unlikely name of Mongolian BBQ & International Buffet. He’d just eaten there, and he had a big smile on his face, and no doubt he promptly sat down and wrote some amazing software. The space that houses Mongolian BBQ hasn’t been particularly kind to restaurateurs over the years, even though the restaurants therein weren’t all that bad. At one point it was Brett Hull’s (which moved there, if memory serves, from Union Station), but even the Golden Brett could only drum up a year or two of business, and after sitting idle for a few months, it turned into Red, Hot & Blue, which was riding a franchise wave owing largely to its popularity with the then-new Clinton administration. It also appeared that there were several different incarnations of the current restaurant before it reached its current state. I think the first was called Four Seasons International Café; then a Japanese restaurant and sushi bar called Kenji annexed the back room, and is in fact still part of Mongolian BBQ today, although oddly enough, the hours aren’t the same. Finally, there was yet another "grand opening" announced, and the big Mongolian kettle grill showed up in the front of the interior, and life went on. For those who haven’t sampled the Mongolian barbecue technique (whose most notable proponent locally has been Shu Shu’s, which had a St. Louis outpost also on Olive for about a year, and retains its original location on the East Side), it involves picking first from your choice of fresh vegetables – broccoli, cabbage, carrots, sprouts, scallions and bell peppers, for example – then moving along to finely sliced raw pork, beef and chicken, along with cylinders of squid. The next station features about a dozen choices for sauces – garlic-based and ginger-based, along with grated versions of the core flavor; hot sauces; hoisin sauce; and several other choices. One ladles one’s choices into a bowl, which is handed to the chef at the Mongolian grill, who in turn flash-grills them all together in a process that takes little more than a minute. The result is a very pleasant alternative in Oriental food, with the sauce cooking very rapidly into the meat, but enough of it left over to sop up with some of the bowlful of rice that has appeared on your table while your food was cooked. The other half of the all-you-can-eat is an extensive buffet, primarily of classic Chinese foods like pot stickers, egg roll, hot-and-sour soup and Oriental-style ribs among the appetizers, and General Tso’s chicken, sweet-and-sour chicken and Hunan squid among the entrees, but also unusual stuff like hot or cold green-lipped mussels and snow crab legs, as well as things like Italian sausage, grilled herbed potatoes and blackened chicken with penne pasta to reinforce the true "international" nature of the buffet. Said buffet has both the plusses and the minuses of most buffets – some of the items can occasionally suffer from steam-table deterioration, while on the flip side, it’s hard to go wrong with all-you-can-eat crab legs, even if they are snow crab. The herbed potatoes will please potato-snarfers with their crusty, multi-herbed exteriors, and the roasted green beans had both a grilled and a nutty flavor to them. All of the half-dozen or so mussels I managed to put away kept a good, fresh flavor (even though they’d likely been frozen somewhere along the line), and never crossed over into fishiness, although the fried fish entree did cross that line somewhat. On balance, it was an excellent spread with several nice surprises. There’s also a salad bar and a dessert bar, the former nicely fresh, but the latter too heavily reliant on industrial cafeteria specialties like carrot cake, brownies and Jell-O. The interior is bright and pleasant, with kelly green walls counterpointing blonde wood paneling, and a couple of remnants remaining from the barbecue joint – namely one wall of brick veneer and another still sporting the painting of the previous tenant’s dancing pig mascots. All along the walls are touristy pictures of everything from St. Louis to Paris to Singapore, further establishing the international theme. I left quite stuffed and satiated, but with an odd craving to run out and write an applet or two. I settled for a cup of the liquid Java (decaf, of course) and a couple games of Tetris.
St. Louis, MO