Goodbye to Cafe de France
Old Czech
Anujin
The Asia Restaurant
Year 2000 Archives
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Obscure Restaurants of Ulaanbaatar
by Shel & Doug
Winter 2001/2 advances in Ulaanbaatar, and Shel & Doug have ceased their summer
frivolities, put on the overcoats and headed into the late Mongolian
autumn for another season of dining in this remote corner of the world.
We'll knock off a restaurant a week, stomachs permitting. Stay with us
and share our winter gastronomic adventures, and perhaps find you a cosy
obscure corner to while away an Ulaanbaatar night. (Note: We have moved all
of our last winter reviews into a new archive area.)
It is a reasonable statement to say that Ulaanbaatar is not one of the gastronomic destinations of the world.
The Mongolian people have never had the time to develop anything other than a basic meat and animal product cuisine. Life in this harsh but beautiful country has always had other imperatives, such as simple survival. Some of the uniquely Mongolian dishes are indeed tasty and filling, but there are very few, and even fewer well done.
Pre 1990, we are told that there was a total of three establishments approaching anything near what we would term a restaurant.
In the decade since democracy, a free market and a minor turning to things "Western", a restaurant society has slowly grown.
Broadly, they fall into three categories:
- Firstly, some very fine and well known favourites. To the local expatriate community, these are oasis of good food and fellowship. The owners are like family friends and one can always find an eating companion if you are alone. We have a page herein dedicated to these, our friends and favourites.
- Secondly, the type which Shel and Doug have classified as "obscure". The qualifications to enter this category are listed below. Of course, there is some blurring at the edges between these first two categories. However, we are trying to bring a little a little more variety into the lives of our friends and visitors by diving once a week into the dark corners of Ulaanbaatar to ferret out dining "gems".
- Finally, there are the tsani gazar's, guanz's, zoogin gazar's and pectopah's that had best be left to hardier travellers than us. There are a myriad of these. Ulaanbaatar is, if nothing else, a city of bars and eateries. We try to watch for any of these that graduate to category two. It is our sincere hope they all do, we get to review them all and we live to a ripe old age doing just that!
Our Guide to Obscure Restaurants is designed on the following basis:
- Obscurity: Hard to find
- Reputation: Little known in the expat community
- Location: The remoter the better
- Cuisine: Eclectic. All cuisines are embraced. But the same national cuisine will not be tried twice in a row.
- Quality of food: We only demand that we personally survive the experience..
- We rate our reviews on a scale of 1 to 5. You will get the idea.
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