We have been hearing good things about HuHot for moooonths. Then last week, Tim had offered to bring me some food while I was working and I said I wanted to try HuHot but I didn't think they did take out. They don't. You can't even take home leftovers, but you can go back for as many servings as you like.
We went for lunch since we'd run late the night before and didn't want to cram down food in the 30 minutes they were still open. When you go for lunch, the salad/soup is optional. We didn't have salads so our meal was $7.99. I still didn't feel hungry enough to "get my money's worth" on it though, but its not bad for what is basically a buffet.
This was my first time doing a real mongolian grill style restaurant though I'd seen small ones at chinese buffets. If you don't know, basically you pick up a bowl and then choose your frozen meat. They had chicken, beef, pork, and two types of white fish. I chose beef. After that, you decide on your noodles. The types of noodles were chinese, yakisoba, and pad thai. I chose chinese noodles. After that came a huuuge table of vegetables, pineapple, mushrooms, tofu, etc I wanted to keep it simple so i picked shredded carrot, some diced onion, and baby corn. At last, you reach the sauce station. They have 12 premade sauces of varying heat and 12 'make your own sauce' ingredients. They suggest that you use 5 to 6 ladles of sauce per meal. I used two ladles of hoisin sauce, two of teriyaki, and a ladle of sesame oil.
Once you build your bowl, you are ready to queue for the fantastically awesome round grill. They have this team of about 5 cooks who constantly rotate around this grill top cooking your ingredients. The first guy takes the bowls and dumps them on the grill and does a cleanup of the next spot up. The next guy breaks up the meal into two piles, and makes sure the meat is getting cooked ok. Then there are a couple more guys all working on different meals and the final guy is scraping the mess into the center hole and doing more cleaning. And all the while their spatulas went *ching ching ching*
I think our only major issue with going to this place happened in the grill line. They had gotten backed up a little so the line went all the way around the grill and where we were standing, the sprinkler system was leaking enough to have us be misted slightly.
After your stuff gets grilled, there is a little station at the end of the grill line with chow mein, peanuts, sunflower seeds, and coconut to put on top. I put on both peanuts and sunflower seeds. And that brings me to the reason I think everyone loves this restaurant: Every meal you have there is exactly how you want it! Yeah, I do give kudos to that cooking team for their perfect timing, but if you choose your own ingredients, how can you not like the food it makes?
As for service and atmosphere.... I liked that for the most part the tables were pretty far apart and they'd sort of partitioned off the food bar and grill areas so that if your table was close to them, you wouldn't get bumped by people getting their food. It's a loud restaurant but not to the point where you have to yell at each other over the din. I think it helped that they didn't have any music playing, at least that I noticed.
Our waiter was pretty rehersed in the opening speech for people who haven't been there before, but almost to the point of sounding bored. Later on he got more friendly (ie. calling me sweetie, thanking us again as we left) and he was quick for refills and taking up plates.
I think I would like to go there again, but as far as I've seen, you don't want to try to go on the typical eat out nights. I would also like to be really hungry before going. I forgot to mention that they bring you a bowl of rice to have with your meal and I must remember not to add the rice to my meal if i want to build a second bowl.
Ratings:
Food: +1
Service: +1
Atmosphere: +1
Value: 0
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