Gengis Khan

Genghis Khan is great for groups. If you have a birthday or family dinner, it’s suitable for everyone.
You can be as fussy or adventurous as you like, picking you meat, vegetables, noodles, sauce and oil, then the chefs cook it on the round barbecue for you.
They also have a buffet with hot chips, fried rice, salads, sushi and bread etc.
For dessert they have pancakes and icecream.
Be sure to book for large groups or on weekend nights, it can get really busy and you can queue for a while to get your food barbecued.

I like the idea of this place. Who wouldn’t? Selecting your meat and vegetables, watching it all get cooked up on a giant round fire pit, and returning again and again untill you can’t fit any more in — it sounds like a meat master’s dream.
And it is — to a point. The problem with having such a normal, easy to fulfill dream, is that many other people have the same dream. So you turn up here and the place is full, over run. Dreams of constantly having a plate full of food disappear as you wait in line while the harassed looking cooks constantly throw more and more meat on in a maelstrom of barbequing.
Having said that, the food was actually really good, and you can manage to sample quite a bit, especialy if you team up with a tablemate. But it’s not the place to come to for a ‘nice family dinner,’ or a relaxing date.

I had never been to Genghis Khan before my cousins invited me. We went sometime after the turn of the New Year, when Auckland was dead and you never knew what restaurants were going to be open. The place was kind of quiet, which is apparently not usually the case.
Genghis Khan in a nutshell, is all you can eat buffet. There’s a selection of raw meats and vegetables and asian style sauces which you pile into a bowl and take to a chef at the back of the room. They fry up your meal on a giant hotplate, and dump it back onto a plate for you to consume. In addition to this ‘cook infront of you’ experience, there’s also a selection of other odd buffet items — fries, noodles, macaroni and cheese, cold boiled eggs and salads, broccoli soup and bread. It’s a real mix of cuisines. The dessert consists of made to order cook infront of you pancakes with a bunch of toppings you can chuck on.
It’s relatively well priced (considering you can eat as much as you want), at $ 25 a head. But don’t expect anything too flash. It’s a bit dirty feeling in there, very family friendly and very ‘cheap eats’ feeling.

This is not the place to bring a hot date while trying to impress her by thinking you are a lot more cultured than you actually are. If you are just after a quick tasty feed and a stiff drink to wash it down then yes you are in the right place. Genghis is a noisy and chaotic place, this is partly lent by the fact that there is no table service but rather a buffet style selection of meats and veges etc that you can then watch the chef cooking on the big grill in the centre of the room. Noise however is not always bad.
It’s always an interesting and fun experience coming here, great for kids and out of towners seem to love the experience as well.
And of course you can’t really go past the price.

If you aren’t a fan of screaming, running, uncontrolled children, don’t come here. Stimulating conversation, relaxing atmosphere and decent service? Not here. By all means, if you have a child’s birthday party to organize this place will be a very attractive prospect to you and your wallet, but not for a special meal or treat.
We had a hastily cleared table pointed out to us and then the staff was lost to the throngs of people. The overcrowding and open BBQ meant an excess of heat and noise, and a loss of patience. We had to wait for clean plates to be available before we could walk the gauntlet of sticky hands reaching from buffet to mouth to buffet. Your meal is flung off the BBQ in your general direction so try and pay attention otherwise another hungry person will walk away with it.
Generally adults lounged at their crowded tables (some playing cards!) while their children run amok between stressed out diners and staff. But you get what you pay for.

I probably would never have come here had it not been for a soccer team dinner where someone else chose the venue. What a pleasant surprise. Buffet eating is not really my thing but the kids LOVE IT. So much so that I found myself making a booking for 22 people on a Friday night for my son’s 10^th birthday.
Unfortunately we were seated outside in the covered courtyard which is so loud you can’t hear yourself think. Add 14 kids and get yourself several large alcoholic beverages. The pricing here is amazing value (those other buffet restaurants could learn a thing or two), with adults costing $ 25 and kids $ 5 plus $ 1 for every year i.e. a 10 year old costs $ 15.
The food on offer here is actually really good and as a semi-​vegetarian, I never imagined I would be saying that about a Mongolian BBQ restaurant. There’s always two soups, usually meat-​free and really tasty. Garlic bread to go with. Mmmmm. The salad bar is fresh and includes everything I would want — boiled eggs, beetroot, pickles, olives, red onions etc and a good choice of dressings. There’s also pasta and potato salads plus a few other as well.
Then there’s the hot selection: fried noodles, a really oily but delicious fettucine, various veggies, tortilla chips, mini spring rolls, pastries… see what I mean? A LOT of choice here. Oh yeah, and that Mongolian BBQ thing. True, you have to select your ingredients and wait in the line but this is all part of the fun (Jesus it’s a FIIIIIRE! Somebody IS barbecuing).
There’s everything you could want for your barbecued meal and it’s all really fresh looking and again, serious value — shrimps, chicken, beef, pretty much every kind of animal you might want to get cooked and put on your plate.
You can also wait in line for fresh pancakes for dessert and my only gripe is the manky water the ice cream scoops sit in. There’s probably no way to avoid this as I know they do replace it regularly and being able to scoop their own ice cream and add their own assortment of toppings is another reason to bring your children here.
It’s noisy, busy and there will absolutely be kids underfoot that are perhaps a little over-​excited, but just look at their little faces — they are having the best time! You can’t be grumpy about that. Just go, it’s reeeeeeally good for what it is.