Sushi Kai in Glendale Provides One of a kind Mongolian Menu

Mongolian — you have carried out that, proper? You’ve got stood in line and picked your veggies, proteins and sauces, then handed your plate over to cooks who dance around a giant circular griddle, rhythmically preserving the conquer with their spatulas as they stir-fry all the things into a mound of steaming food stuff. Spots like HuHot and BD’s Mongolian Grill have spread into just about every corner of the place, and more Us citizens have likely eaten at these and very similar chains than the total inhabitants of Mongolia itself.

But Mongolian barbecue isn’t really genuinely Mongolian, and neither is the Mongolian beef found on so several Chinese cafe menus. They are both of those new inventions in the culinary environment — so the latest, in reality, that they can be traced to just one person. According to Eddy Chang of the Taipei Situations, Mongolian barbecue was invented in Taiwan in the early 1950s by Wu Zhao-nan, a comic from mainland China who utilized the phrase “Mongolian” to give his eatery a small international mystique.

For actual Mongolian delicacies, you can expect to have to check out an unlikely location: a sushi bar in Glendale’s Town Set enhancement. Sushi Kai opened at Metropolis Established in early 2019, and during non-pandemic times was regarded for its conveyor-belt sushi-shipping and delivery process. But the cafe is now beneath new possession that changed its identify to Sushi Kai & Mongolian Cuisine and extra many dishes unique in Denver.

Picture Wyoming if you want to realize Mongolia’s agriculture. Large-open grasslands, rocky vistas and cold winds are the typical components, so no matter what grows there ought to be winter season-hardy. Mongolian staples incorporate wheat, mutton and, to a lesser extent, beef, supplemented with root vegetables and other create that merchants well. As a outcome, the Mongolian dishes at Sushi Kai are warming and familiar, and some feed right into a single of the hottest present food stuff trends: dumplings.

Sushi Kai delivers 3 varieties of Mongolian dumplings. The buuz and bansh dumplings are comparable but for their shape. They’re each crammed with floor beef (the menu claims it’s organic), green onion and garlic, but the bansh are pyramid-shaped when the buuz are pleated on top rated, like Chinese soup dumplings. The bansh are also more compact and occur twelve to an order, creating them easier to share, while the buuz appear in sets of six with a facet of potato salad (with more compact, firmer cubes of potato than conventional American potato salad) — which would seem a small odd but adds to the convenience-foods concept.

The other dumplings, termed khuushuur, are deep-fried fairly than steamed. The outcome is a crisp pastry shell encompassing a smaller, mildly seasoned beef patty.

If you just cannot get ample dumplings, there are two dumpling soups: Banshtai tsai is a flour-thickened soup designed with Mongolian tea in the broth and floating with dumplings, and bantan is a beef or lamb (the cafe makes use of natural and organic, grass-fed New Zealand lamb as an alternative of the a lot more conventional mutton) soup made with bone broth, vegetables and small dumplings produced by crumbling dough into the simmering broth.

Sushi Kai also tends to make its individual Mongolian noodles by rolling dough thin and then cutting it into strips. The noodles, flavored with specks of spinach, show up in tsuivan, a stir-fry that also consists of beef or tripe and veggies. Or you can get a simple beef or lamb soup loaded with those people noodles. This one’s best eaten as quickly as doable, since the noodles rapidly soak up the broth and can become soggy if remaining sitting down way too prolonged.

You are going to come across Mongolian barbecue at Sushi Kai, but it can be not the standard Americanized model. This barbecue is khorkhog, and it’s intended to feed four or 5 folks, as a result the $125 price tag tag. You can expect to require to purchase a day in advance, since the preparing and cooking is labor-intense. This exclusive food contains lamb, potatoes, carrots, onions, dumplings and soup, all gradual-cooked around hot stones.

Despite the fact that Sushi Kai is open up with limited seating in the dining place and a couple of socially distanced sushi counter seats, the conveyor belt is not currently jogging. But you can still get your fill of sushi, signature rolls and Japanese appetizers and entrees, and you can even sample the bansh dumplings and bantan soup in smaller sizes from the appetizer menu if you’re not ready to take a complete Mongolian plunge.

Sushi Kai & Mongolian Cuisine is positioned at 682 South Colorado Boulevard in Glendale, and is open day-to-day from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. for lunch and 4:30 to 9 p.m. for evening meal, with happy hour from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Call 720-583-2414 or stop by sushikai.co for takeout and delivery orders.

Mark Antonation is the Westword Food items & Consume Editor. He received his get started by having at and producing about every cafe on Federal Boulevard and continues to go over metro Denver’s assorted intercontinental food scene, as perfectly as the city’s immediately modifying restaurant landscape. Mark was awarded Exceptional Media Expert by the Colorado Restaurant Affiliation in 2018.