Mongo's, Asian restaurant in Deutz, Cologne, Germany
Mongo's is an Asian restaurant in the Deutz neighborhood of Cologne, built around an open kitchen where chefs cook at individual woks in full view of the guests. Buffet stations along the dining area offer raw ingredients including meat, vegetables, and seafood that guests pick before handing them over to be cooked.
Mongo's opened in Cologne over 25 years ago as one of the early restaurants in Germany to offer this kind of interactive wok cooking format. It has stayed at its Deutz location since then and continued to run the same concept without major changes.
The restaurant follows a format common across parts of Asia, where eating is as much about watching the cooking as tasting the food. Guests around the same table can end up with very different plates depending on what they picked from the stations.
The restaurant is in Deutz and is open in the evenings, including late on weekends, so it can work well for a dinner out after other activities in the area. Arriving a little earlier in the evening helps avoid the busiest period, especially on Fridays and Saturdays.
Guests can build their own marinade by mixing sauces and spices from the stations before handing over their ingredients, which means two people at the same table can use identical raw ingredients and end up with completely different results. This level of control over the final flavor is not something you find in most restaurants.
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