Mongolian Barbecue

When I was a child there was a restaurant in town that served Mongolian barbecue.   It was a fun experience for me because I got to pick out uncooked vegetables and meats, put them in a bowl and then watch as the chefs cooked mine and many other people’s meals on a huge flat, round cooking surface.

There were lots of flames as the cooks would move our meals slowly around the circular surface.  I would watch them put the flavorings on as the food began to cook.   There wasn’t a lot of choice flavor-wise: you could have sweet and sour, hot and spicy on a scale of one to ten and combination of the two.    I always got just the sweet and sour.

As I got older, I took friends to the restaurant.  It was terrible atmosphere, the tables were warped and the carpet seemed sticky and dirty, but none of us cared.   Over the years I found out more and more people had the same love of the restaurant and their food as I did, sometimes because I’d run into friends while we stood in line waiting to fill our bowls.

Then there was a hurricane and a flood and the restaurant from my childhood decided to close due to costs to repair and reopen.   Everyone talked about it.  We were all sad to have lost the restaurant due to finances.    Then, not that long ago, we heard they’d reopened.  It was another location across town but it was the same restaurant.   But was it really the same?

On our first visit we walked in to find the same ingredients, the same cooking surface and the same flavor choices and when the food arrived, it tasted just the same as we all remembered it.   Tonight, we’re going out with my parents who haven’t been there since they reopened.   My children are going too.  They didn’t know the old location as it closed before they were born, but they like the food, which is all that really matters.

The Big Boy Update:  My son ran into the bedroom in the middle of the night.  He said, “I had a nightmare, how do I make it go away?”  I told him we should talk about Nexo Knights (because he’s obsessed with them right now) and for the next few minutes he was distracted from the nightmare.   Then he suddenly said, “ghosts are real.”  Dad and I said we didn’t think they were but some people believed it.  My son replied, “scientists think they are.’   My husband realized what he was talking about and said, “Oh, from the show Cosmos?  What they said was the stars are like ghosts because the light comes to us long after the star has burned all its energy and died.”  After a few more star-based questions my son was ready to go back to bed, having gotten over his nightmare.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been a question monster lately.  You can hardly get one question answered before she launches into a second, third, twelfth one.