Crazy Hibachi Review

Last Friday night, I decided to go out for dinner and a movie with a couple of people. To be honest, we usually drive out to Rave to see movies, but we wanted to save some time, so we went to Lakewood 8 instead. We bought the tickets first, then drove around looking for a restaurant with a short wait time. We ended up at Crazy Hibachi in Lakewood Village, where they were able to seat us immediately. I went to Crazy Hibachi not long after it opened a couple of years ago, but for no particular reason, haven't been back since. This time, we ate at the Mongolian Grill.

If you're not familiar with Crazy Hibachi, it's got three different areas. There is a sushi bar (which I've never been to), there is an area where groups of about 6-8 people sit around a chef while he fixes your meal and does tricks along the way, then there is the Mongolian grill. At the Mongolian grill, there is a buffet with various kinds of meats, vegetables, and sauces. You pick whatever you want, throw it all in a bowl together, then give it to a chef next to the buffet. He throws your food on a giant grill and cooks it while you wait. It just takes a minute and your food come out hot and fresh.

Selection: The buffet had a very nice selection of meats to choose from. The choices included: beef tenderloin, pork tenderloin, chicken, shrimp, sausage, calamari, mini scallops, and crab (imitation). The other half of the buffet included lo mein noodles, and vegetables of all kinds. I'm not big on vegetables, so I don't remember everything they had. I know there were two kinds of bell peppers, carrots, broccoli, onions, and probably about 15 others I didn't eat and therefor don't remember. To all this, you can add at least 8 different sauces, peanuts, salt, sugar, garlic or an egg. In addition, the chef will add your sauce of choice right before taking your food off the grill for that extra bit of flavor.

Atmosphere: Nice decorations and ambiance. My only complaint was that as the tables filled up and the chef was grilling up a storm, the constant clanging of his tools on the grill was a little annoying and made conversation harder to maintain. We were only a couple of tables from the grill, but the area for the Mongolian grill is such a size that you couldn't get too away if you tried.

Price: It was $14.99 per person to eat at the Mongolian grill. The food is only as good as you make it, but it's all-you-can-eat, so if you don't like what you make, you can try again. It was much better than anything I've had at other all-you-can-eat buffets, and I did get to control how much of my favorite things I got. The drawback was that apart from a cup of rice (steamed or fried) and a small salad, there wasn't anything to go with it. Maybe I'm missing the point of a Mongolian grill, but for $14.99, an egg roll would have been nice. Cokes or iced tea were $1.50.

Overall: The food was good, and while I would certainly go back for a special occasion, but I won't be adding Crazy Hibachi to my regular rotation of restaurants. If you're the kind of person who never needs a to-go box, Crazy Hibachi is for you. As for me, at most restaurants where I would pay $15, I end up taking home enough to make lunch the next day. At Crazy Hibachi, the food was good, but I didn't eat enough to make it worth what I paid considering my lunch the next day was back to tuna fish.

Miscellaneous: Since I was headed straight to the theater after dinner, I utilized the bathroom at Crazy Hibachi instead of taking a gamble with the theater's facilities. In hindsight, I should have waited. The bathroom smelled like smoke, I had to hold the handle down in order for the toilet to flush, and the stalls were about on par with what I would expect from a public high school. Nothing was dirty or broken, but it was certainly not what I expected based on how well decorated and maintained the restaurant as a whole was.