Yesterday, Clyde and I went to Jackson’s China Belle restaurant for the first time in more than a year.
China Belle serves up your generic Chinese buffet fare (General Tso’s chicken, sweet and sour chicken … you know the drill) with a twist: they’ve installed a Mongolian grill.
Now, the restaurant dedicates one buffet table to raw strips of chicken, raw beef, and various cut veggies. You fill your plate with flesh, walk the length of the entire restaurant, and hand it over to the surly Grill Keeper, who dumps everything onto what looks like a scorching-hot stainless steel tabletop.
This unique approach has its downsides. Jacksonites aren’t very careful with the tongs they use to select their raw meat, making cross-contamination very likely (as I discovered a bit later in the day, thank you very much). Worse, the Mongolian grill isn’t vented, so the dining room is filled with a thin, grey, greasy smoke.
The Grill Keeper knows his audience — overweight Southerners — very well, so he’s extremely liberal with his squirt bottle of glistening oil. If you don’t want your food “Exxon Valdez” style, be sure to pantomime “No Oil!” within seconds of passing him your plate.
The Mongolian grill is, at least, an attempt to be distinctive in a market bulging with look-alike, taste-alike Chinese buffets. (Sun Koon implemented the same innovation, but closed it down after repeated citations for cross-contamination.) When I left, though, I felt all too greasy — inside and out.
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