Big change at Big Wok [restaurant review]
Having the Big Wok staff plate the customer’s selections speeds service. Photo by JP Cordero If you were trying to make a list of restaurants that wouldn’t be likely to survive in an era of personal distancing, Mongolian barbecues would be near the top. Part of the attraction of the experience is picking whatever you want from the raw items on the buffet and trickling your favorite combinations of sauce and seasonings on top of the heap of food. Then you stand in a tightly packed line as the chefs toss your food on top of a grill shaped like a huge steel mushroom, before heading back to your table with a steaming bowl of stir-fry. All of this is, as the text on your placemat will inform you, is part of a tradition that goes back to Genghis Khan and his nomadic horseman. This is a lie of massive proportions, because the style of dining was actually invented in Taiwan in 1951 by a celebrated comedian who opened a food stall in Taipei. He was going to call it Beijing style BBQ but references to that city were too political, so he called it Mongolian barbecue even though it had no connection to the tribal horsemen who rode the grassy steppes. Since that style of dining was invented so…
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