Mongolian Grill

This wasn't lunch: a friend is leaving Canada and so we went there for a going-away.  I like the friend, even though I don't like Mongolian Grill, so we went there for dinner.

So, the deal with this place is that you "pick your own meal", which is to say, you take a bowl, fill it with random raw ingredients or cooked noodles, and then they grill/stirfry it on a giant flat griddle.  You eat it with rice or tortillas.  You go back for as many bowls as you want, for $16-$18 at dinner time.

For lunch, you can get the "lunch quickie", which is one bowl (I think they're smaller than they once were) for something like $9+tax+tip.  This isn't...too bad?  It'd be around as much food as the lunch pastas at ESM, I guess, given that they do give you rice and tortillas.

But the problem is that the actual supplied food is so...meh.  There are lots of meats, but they're all the second-order meats: teeny shrimp, dark-meat chicken, squid, beef and pork (I don't eat these), unidentified white fish.  All of them quite often still have ice on them, since they're straight from the freezer.  There are lots of starches (because, hey, if you eat wheat or rice noodles as part of your all-you-can-eat "feast", so much the better for them!), and random fresh veggies, though "seasonal" would be something of a joke.  If, in the best August for tomatoes in recent memory, tomatoes look like the ones we get in January, then You're Doing It Wrong.  There is fresh garlic.

Then you add oily sauces and random dried spices, and they grill them.  The spices are "Thai" or "Lemon" or "Soya" or the like.  I vaguely thought they once had one I liked that was gingery, but, um, not anymore.

This means that getting tasty food is not easy.  I once upon a time would make garlic/ginger/spicy squid with broccoli as my only dish there, but nowadays, I can't even do that.  I tried to make something vaguely Thai, but they don't have curry paste or coconut milk.

I don't get the appeal, honestly.  I mean, I get how they make money (they stuff people full of salty carbs with some cheap meat or veg), but going there never really did it for me. 

I had: dinner "feast", which for me was two bowls of food: one was garlic squid with broccoli, the other rice noodles with chicken and garlic and "lemon" sauce.  A pint of, um, some IPA.
I paid: I think around $27?  The "feast" is $16+tax+tip on Tuesdays.
Verdict:
Speed: They were slammed the night we went there, so getting bowls, or refills, or tortillas, was slow.  Once the host realized our waitress had gotten monopolized by another table, he took good care of us.
Quality: I think it's gone down, and I was never a fan.
Value: Lousy for dinner.  For lunch, I guess it's okay.  I mean, you get what you "want".  I just don't want what was on offer.
Would go back: I'm sure I will, but I try to keep it infrequent.