Before I begin, let me come clean: I am biased against restaurants that make the consumer do the work. This usually precludes me — to my wife's chagrin — from visiting fondue joints. I love the smell of deep-fried food as much as the next guy, but when did sticking skewers of raw meat into boiling oil become a romantic experience?
There is another type of consumer participation, though, made famous by the "Mongolian barbecue" fad of the '80s and '90s. In these places, you don't cook the food, but you do have to assemble it, handing your raw concoction over to cooks stationed at a giant metal millstone of a griddle. That's almost as bad. With fondue, you can ruin the food by over or undercooking. With this kind of BBQ, you can ruin it by choosing a poor combination of ingredients, before the food even hits the heat. It's a lot of pressure to put on folks who are paying for their dinner.
Dish opened in 2000 — at Baywalk and Centro Ybor — with a snappy catchphrase geared toward 21st-century sensibilities: "market-style dining." Founder John Schall brought this updated Mongolian barbecue concept from his work at Fire + Ice, a similar chain based in Massachusetts. I've eaten at Fire + Ice as well as Dish, and all I can say is this gimmick should not have been resurrected.
If you've never visited one of these places, here's how it goes: First, fill a bowl with food. It's all laid out in salad bar form, individual containers filled with veggies or fruit, cooked pasta, or raw meat and seafood. Second, fill a smaller bowl with one of about 14 sauces. Third, let Dish's staff cook your ingredients on the giant metal "grill," dumping the sauce on at the last minute. Finally, enjoy the bounty of your food-pairing genius with rice and tortillas at your table.
That's the primer. Follow that and you will return to your table to find the veggies a peculiar combination of charred and raw, and the meat alternating between jaw-breakingly well-done and suspiciously rare, with no flavor to be found in the entire pile of griddled, market-style deliciousness.
No matter what sauce you pick, if you don't season food before and during cooking — especially meat — it's not going to taste like anything. Dropping a bowl of neon orange mango habanero liquid onto badly cooked, unseasoned food isn't going to do anything other than make it taste vaguely like mango and habanero.
Here's a tip that all chefs know — salt is necessary. A hefty dose of salt is often the only difference between bland and tasty, dull and exciting. It concentrates and enlivens the natural flavors of the ingredients. Cook some raw food without it and you'll see how bad unseasoned food can be. Or you can eat at Dish.
Salt also allows vegetables to lose some of their liquid, allowing them to cook faster, removing some of the raw crunch. Without it, veggies don't cook in the short amount of time spent on the griddle at Dish. I crunched through broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, onions and celery — all raw and insipid.
Theoretically, people working the griddle can adjust the cooking by moving certain items toward the center of the "wheel," where it's hotter, but in practice all they do is put the meat at the top and the veggies toward the bottom. Count on one or two ingredients cooked correctly, if you're lucky.
Sauces are almost uniformly bland, without the punch of flavor that might rehabilitate an awfully cooked plate of food. And then there's the shock of throwing centain liquids on a blazing hot griddle. Standing at the counter separating the cooking area and the impatiently waiting crowd, I could smell cream sauces scorching almost the instant they hit the metal and see sweet sauces turn from caramelized to black and burnt in seconds.
A plate of chicken and a dose of Asian peanut sauce was the best combination, of the dozen or so I tried. My companion called it "about on the level of mediocre Chinese take-out."
While observing the cooking one night, I noticed something that almost had me running for the door before they could hand me a plate of stirfry. Each cook uses two long spatulas to manipulate the food on the griddle, with lots of meaningless pseudo-Benihana clicking and clacking for effect. The same spatulas are used from start to finish, with no cleaning except an occasional scrape. A cook would drop a bowl of raw chicken on the griddle, adjust it with spatulas, then use the same utensils on food in different stages of doneness. That's a little scary.
There are also some practical issues. If you're going to Dish with a date, plan on spending a lot of time apart. Some people choose ingredients quicker than others; some bowls cook faster. Often, one person is waiting at the griddle while their companion is chowing at the table. Then, vice versa.
When I told a few friends about my experiences at Dish, they said they like to go because it's all you can eat for only $14.95. That's about the only thing the place has going for it.
Desserts are made in the back, by actual Dish chefs, so I had the vague hope that something could be salvaged from a dreadful dinner, until I had one of the most surreal experiences of a long life dining out. I took a bite of apple crisp ($3.95) and found the topping was made of chewy, undercooked oats. I figured that was to be expected. Then I dug a little deeper. Then a little deeper. Then a little … all right, enough build-up — there were no apples in the damn apple crisp! I found exactly three desiccated slivers of what could only be dehydrated fruit jerky in a giant pile of stale, sugary oats. Good grief.
If you are looking for "market style dining," then go to the market. Buy some food. Go home and cook it. It'll have to be better than this.
Brian Ries is a former restaurant general manager with an advanced diploma from the Court of Master Sommeliers. He can be reached at brian.ries@weeklyplanet.com. Planet food critics dine anonymously, and the paper pays for the meals. Restaurants chosen for review are not related to advertising.
This article appears in Apr 5-11, 2006.