Mongo's Grill

Mongo’s is the sort of place you go when the munchies have set in hard. I am convinced that a place like this could make a killing off of the late night bar/stoner crowd but, for some unexplainable reason it insists upon closing at 9pm sharp. It’s a soulless prefab chain restaurant, located in a soulless big box shopping complex along route 90; the sodas are all you can drink and the stir fry is all you can eat—a win-win proposition if ever there was one. Mongo’s has a sort of bizzaro-land 1980’s vibe to it, which probably has a lot to do with the Chuck-E-Cheese meets Perkins décor and cheap, loud-coloured dishes. In fairness though, the majority of people who go there come from the surrounding cookie-cutter suburbs and, last I checked, they dig that sort of shit. This fact was confirmed for me when I last visited Mongo’s this past Sunday. We were confronted with a solid 30 minute wait, which wouldn’t normally be too bad, but this restaurant was not designed for this sort of pandemonium. About twenty five people restlessly milling about in the small entryway, suspiciously eyeing each newly seated party. A strange, tense, energy was hanging in the air and, though I’m not sure, I imagine that this same sort of energy is the kind that precedes a great white feeding frenzy—“Our wallets are fat and our bellies are empty and we have come to feed….NOW!” Fortunately, everyone was able to remain civil and a half hour later we were in gluttony heaven.

Reservations about food poisoning aside, this DIY stir fry concept is pretty kick ass. You fill up a bowl with stuff from salad bar style trays filled with veg, meat, noodles and sauces and then give it to the cook who fries it on a massive circular iron grill with huge metal poker sticks. They milk the open kitchen concept for all it’s worth (or at least as far as short order cooks are capable of taking it), but the garishness of it all just seems right. So far as I can tell, the food is edible and actually pretty tasty once you figure out the sauces and other like variables. So, in the end it comes down to whether or not you can handle throngs of suburbia’s finest and don’t mind a little kitsch; if you can, 20$ can get you a shocking amount of pretty good stir-fry.


John E. Ryall.


7.4/10