Bar-B-Q Plaza @ Mines Shopping Mall

Last weekend, KS brought me to try out Bar-B-Q Plaza @ Mines Shopping Mall.  Bar-B-Q Plaza has been here in Malaysia for quite a while already and there seems to be quite some hype over it.  Thinking it was time for me to find out what's special about it, I insisted to have lunch there.

Bar-B-Q Plaza is a self-cooking Mongolian and Japanese-style barbecue restaurant that originates from Thailand.  Somehow, the name is a bit misleading as it it is not the usual barbecue that you would expect.  Their cooking method is a combination of barbecue & steaming, which is in a way a healthier and better option since the cooked meat will maintain its juiciness and will not be too heaty.

We decided to go for the Pork Supreme Set (RM 31.90) that comes with fresh slices of pork, bacon strips, chicken slices, squid, shelled prawns, udon, baby corns, carrots, sliced cabbage (which is refillable), lettuce and sliced tomatoes.  For the hungry stomachs, the supreme set also comes with two bowls of rice (which unfortunately, were not cooked with sufficient water).

While it did claimed that the Supreme Set is sufficient for 2-3 person, I begged to differ.  Even with the bowl of rice, I was only able to meet the 70% mark - plenty of room for more snacks.  So, if you are a big eater, you probably need to order some side dishes or go for a larger set.

The way to eat it is to first pour some chicken stock over the hot plate before greasing it with pork lard (didn't really grease well with that).  Then, you can place the meat and seafood to slowly grill on the hot plate.  While waiting, you can add the vegetables and udon into the soup.

It is pretty interesting but I find the grilling part not to my expectation as it did not grill well to get the golden brown.  Also, the chicken stock was, unfortunately, pretty disappointing as it was not very flavourful and tasted more like diluted soup.

What I liked the most about Bar-B-Q is the dipping sauce, which combines a few ingredients such as their special barbecue sauce, freshly cut chilli, minced garlic and freshly squeezed lime juice.  Their barbecue sauce, which is a vegetarian-based sauce specially concocted from Bangkok, is sweet and tasted like the dim sum sweet sauce.

Depending on your liking, you can mix any of the ingredients for your dipping sauce.  For me, that is a lot of lime juice and garlic with that special barbecue sauce.

Without the dipping sauce, the meal would have been pretty bland as the meat have not been marinated with any seasonings.  Well, in fact, that is the intention of Bar-B-Q Plaza.

This branch, which just opened in Mines Shopping Mall in July 2012, is pretty comfortable and clean.  Service-wise, they are pretty quick to refill the cabbage (although I must admit the amount of cabbage reduced after each refill) & soup.

All in all, this place is not too bad.  At least they serve really fresh ingredients and you get a chance to taste the natural flavours of food.  But will I come back for it again, well, pretty hard to say.