(written for eLuna Website)

Restaurant review:

Gizmongolia, 9 Helene Hamalka St. (between Bank Tefahot and, perhaps fittingly, the Russian Compound), Jerusalem. Tel. 02-624-0490. Open noon to 11:30 p.m., and after Shabbat.

Price: standard NIS 89 per person, all-you-can-eat, including first course and dessert.

I had an amazing meal once, and I would have summoned the chef to beg for the recipe.
    But the restaurant did not have a chef.
    The menu could not provide any clues, because this restaurant did not have menus.
    That is because at Gizmongolia, you are the chef, and your imagination is the menu.
    Either I was a culinary genius or just lucky, but the concoction I put together turned into a masterpiece. And that's why Gizmongolia is currently my favorite restaurant: it's great fun, creative, and immensely satisfying.
    This is a novel way to eat out. After being served a starter course of soup and terrific eggrolls, I got up and got to work.
    I toddled over to the "kitchen" and filled a bowl from a vast display of raw ingredients. A bit of this, a bit of that, a dollop of sauce and a dash of spice, a pinch of herbs; then I presented it to Chin, the Mongolian grillman, and after a couple of minutes I had a sizzling stir-fried creation tailor-made to my taste.
    You can be conservative, or you can go nuts.
    Me, I went nuts. For this masterpiece, which I call Fruity Orbaum's Fruity Beef Stirfry, I took a few bits of beef, baby carrots, broccoli and red pepper, dared myself to add raisins, pineapple and orange (I imagined at this point the grillman was going to make a rude comment at me), garlic, walnuts, Teriyaki sauce, paprika, oregano, olive oil, black olives -- no, on second thought, I left out the black olives -- and finally, a few thin rice sheets. Instead of sending my compliments to the chef, I simply congratulated myself.
    The best part is that it’s an all-you-can-eat setup. You want to gorge yourself silly on the first trip to the buffet, but the best advice is: CONTROL YOURSELF! (Yeah, I know, look who's talking. I tend to start a restaurant meal like I've just ended a month-long hunger strike.)
    Take a small portion, quell the hunger pangs, then go back and try something else. Feed on that, chat a bit with your date, then amble over for more. This can go on for hours.
    It solves my biggest problem when I burst into a good restaurant: I want to try everything. Here, you can. My personal record at Giz was six trips to the trough, and together with my date's four dishes (naturally, we exchanged tasty forkfuls), I sampled 10 different meals.
    Someday I'll have to go there with a mathematician, just to figure out the theoretical number of combinations. To give you an idea, there are 12 kinds of meat (including fish and poultry), 27 fruits and vegetables, 16 wet flavorings (sauces, oils, etc.), 24 spices and herbs, seven different pastas and rices, not to mention tofu -- and everything is presented in bite-sized format.
    Lily, the friendly owner of Gizmongolia, is not the best advertisement for the place: she's thin. If I could eat there at will, I'd be a blob. But Lily works off a lot of calories through hard work. She accompanies diners to the buffet and helps you concoct a creation to your liking. Most people get the idea after the first or second time, and even if you don't know which end of a spatula is the handle, you know what you like to eat.
    That's another part of the winning formula at Giz: you don't have to be a kitchen whiz. Also, there's no place better for people on diets or with allergies, or subject to any kind of food prohibitions, like vegetarians or diabetics, because the only ingredients used are the ones you choose.
    The concept of kosher Mongolian is pretty funny, in part because the concept of Mongolian cuisine is itself strange. I asked Lily about this: "What exactly do Mongolians eat?" Her answer was: "Everything." (I assume that does not include humous and tehina, because there isn't any.) "Whatever there is, they eat," she explained. For fear of losing my appetite, I did not press her for details.
    Lily told me that many diners come in expecting a Chinese restaurant, so now she's starting to offer a choice of stuff-yourself-silly Mongolian, or Chinese from a menu -- at the same price of NIS 89 (first course and dessert included). There will be about 20 Chinese offerings such as mixed brochettes a la BBQ, and a melt-in-your-mouth duck dish with mushrooms and bamboo. For this, they've hired a wizardly Chinese chef.
    I was urged to try a glass of newly-kosher Italian Chianti '94 red. For free, I'll try anything. Next time, even if I have to pay for it, that's the vino for me -- unless they insist I try a free taste of their popular Chilean wine.
    Being a flesh-eater, I always make the same mistake at Gizmongolia: one trip too many to the buffet, leaving no room for the yummy denouement. Desserts include fresh fruit, fried fruit (banana, pineapple, apple, coconut), lychee and ice cream. If you're a party of three or more, you can ask for the dessert plate, which includes the full gamut.
    My dessert was a bit unorthodox. While my lovely companion tucked into a refreshing wild berry sherbet, I caved in to my urges, and went back just one more time. My dessert was a bowl of lamb, pumpkin, eggplant, peas, onion rings, lemon chunks, basil, sumac, sesame oil, white wine, kikoman sauce, chopped nuts and fetuccini, which Chin -- Lord knows what he was thinking of me by now in his native language -- dutifully spread onto his grill. Perhaps I should have asked him to mix in some ice cream too.