Big Chow Grill

Going downhill fast. Went three times within a couple of weeks for lunch and all three Times they burned the meat and the rice (or noodles) were dry. It could be because we always go early and they hadn’t gotten into their groove but it takes away from the experience. The service is ok, but they tend to forget about refilling drinks. It’s also pretty loud. It’s not set up to be a quiet spot to eat as you can hear others, plainly, from across the room. This leads to people talking louder and louder to the point that you can’t have a conversation. Great idea, poor implementation.

FRUIT FLY SWARMS!!!
Usually pretty good. Lately… quality seems to be suffering a tad but the real kicker was today’s lunch experience. The place is SWARMING with fruit flies! I probably go there 3 – 4 times a year and have been for several years and never dealt with swarms of fruit flies. I felt like I was in the middle of plague being inflicted upon a pharaoh.
For a place that has to have food out, you simply CANNOT afford to have fruit flies swarming everywhere. Not that its okay anywhere but ESPECIALLY a buffet type concept like this. I thought it was bad enough when I saw some fly away when I went to choose food for my bowl but then I sat down and spent my entire lunch trying to bat them away from my food and drink. So very very relaxing and enjoyable after busting my ass for 6 hours. I counted 12 flies hanging out on the wall next to my table. I, of course, complained to my service in a very polite and jocular manner — as is my style. She empathized as the servers deal with the same issue when they are eating before the place opens. Not the servers’ fault but wtf is management thinking? Apparently, they have been having this issue for weeks. WEEKS!!! are you kidding me? There are a bazillion companies that do nothing but spray/​bomb restaurants after hours to kill roaches and other vermin. Do whatever it takes you morons! Unreal. Too bad too because I rarely am motivated enough to leave a review on Unilocal but I couldn’t let other people experience the same thing. I MAY give them another shot because its such a healthy option but not before calling to see if the problem has been resolved.
Lastly, I want to point out that I’m not easily grossed out. I have to inspect all kinds of homes — from apartments to mansions and have seen it all and regularly. I have to go into crawl spaces under homes etc. I see all kinds of nasty stuff all the time but I don’t want it in/​on my F****** food!!!
sheesh…

One of my favorite places. If you are on a diet, believe me you would find what you need. If you can’t have noodles or rice, don’t worry you will find enough vegetables to mix with you favorite meat. This place is good for anyone with different tastes. I love it because you can make your own mix and it will be cooked perfectly. Try the coconut soup with chicken or shrimp and also try wraps. For appetizers, try the roti bread. It is delicious. Give this place a shot and you will become addicted to it.

My first bowl took 1 hour to be delivered to me and everything was messed up, and half of my bowl was missing. My second bowl the rice was all clumped up and my 3^rd bowl came and the meat was burnt to a crisp.

Absolutely loved this place! We ate lunch here today being first timers it was a little confusing but we picked it up quick. Picked it up, and put it down… in our belies. It was sooooo good. The staff of young ladies that worked the lunch shift today, nothing but applause! Cannot wait to go back.

Fresh lunch for a great price.
I love this idea. You know exactly what is going in your food, so you can make it as healthy or unhealthy as you want. Even though this is basically diy, it’s not something I feel like I could make at home. All the variety and sauces make this place worth it.
I piled my bowl high with fresh veggies, chose the Thai peanut pesto sauce, and grabbed a variety of meat. I wish I had stuck with just the calamari. I loved the calamari the most. The beef and fish were both good, but the calamari stuck out to me.
I thought I made great choices. I enjoyed eating everything I chose. I heard you can go wrong and make a meal you don’t want to eat, but that is pretty rare.
The food comes quickly, so this is a good place to go if you want a quick lunch. It has a good volume level so it is perfect if you have a meeting.
Overall, I like this place and consider it a great lunch option.

Excellent food. Terrible wait staff!!! Everyone seems unhappy to be there, they definitely don’t go out of their way to make you feel welcomed here. Such a shame because our food was delicious! But we won’t return until they get better staff that understand why they are there… to SERVE GUESTS.

I love… no, LOVE Mongolian grill style food. I mean, what’s NOT to love? You can modify every bowl to exactly what you want, it’s fresh, it’s quick, can be healthy, etc. Add reasonable pricing and the fact that I live not 5 minutes from this place, and I really, REALLY wanted to love Big Chow.
But alas, it’s just alright. It’s definitely far from my favorite Mongolian joint (that would be PJ Lee’s in Brick, NJ, for the record), and while it’s not horrible, I can’t give it my big stamp of approval. Why? Let me count the ways:
— The smell. It’s not a BAD smelling place, necessarily… but if a place is cooking fresh-​to-​order food, shouldn’t it smell particularly GOOD? This place had a damp, indistinguishable scent… one that made me wonder if I was in the right place when I got there.
— The sauces… In terms of variety, it was a good situation… but in terms of potency, not so much. I felt like I needed a LOT of any particular sauce to actually get the flavor to pop. No bueno.
— Some of the offerings in the food bar didn’t seem super-​duper fresh. The meats that were flash frozen were fine — the chicken/​beef/​pork were not an issue… but the squid was questionable. I opted not to have it. The Mister did. Can you guess which one of us got violently ill following our visit? Yeah.
— The actual cooking. Something here was just off. Either the grill wasn’t hot enough, or things didn’t cook long enough, but the products just didn’t have that flavor we were looking for. The food didn’t caramelize the way you’d expect — the noodles didn’t pick up that great, somewhat-​crisp-​edged texture that one might want. It seems like if the folks manning the big old grills weren’t rushed, or just paid a little more attention to what they were doing/​managed the grills’ temps better, the resulting eats would be way better.
DO BETTER, Y’ALL. I WANT TO LOVE YOU! WHY WON’T YOU LET ME LOVE YOU?!

My brother had recommended me to go to this place and I can tell you guys this, he has no taste in food whatsoever!
Although the service was excellent, the food was horrible.
Here, you can create your own noodles or rice dish with their sauce and toppings and they will cook it for you.
I had tried their lo mein and flat noodles.
The lo mein was hard and not really your typical lo mein noodles.
Flat noodles were okay.
You have a choice of different vegetables, sauces, meat & seafood.
What I didn’t really like the concept of the whole wooden paddle you had to stick in your food. They’ll give you one paddle, and when you’re done with mixing your own bowl, you would stick the paddle in the bowl every time you put it at where the chef cooks it for you.
You go back to your table and the server will bring you your food.
I also mix myself a bowl of vegetables and got the vegetables soup. The vegetable soup was very bland, tasted like WATER!!! It was horrible! I had to keep on adding salt. And also they stick the paddle into your soup bowl, so it’s just floating on top of your soup, and the paddle is written in permanent marker and you write your name in pencil on it. Just horrible!

Great place! It’s like a Mongolian grill, but it has more possibilities including: making it into soup, stir fry w rice, stir fry w noodles, Thai, Chinese. Or even Italian ! Unlimited choose your own food licioys dishes! Amazing and tadty

This one very simple! It’s a buffet you make your own dish they give you different ingredients sauce, vegetables rice and pasta to choose from. They offer option to turn it into entrée, salad, different soup, wrap. Everything is fresh ingredient and you are welcome to add many things as you like and got back for 2^nd or more. They also have dishes with ingredients to make certain food if you are not sure what to make. This place brings out the art of food to your choosing. I did have the dessert very was new York cheese cake which was amazing!!!

Big Chow Grill gets extra points for applying a distinctive concept in dining. It’s kind of a mixture of a sit-​down restaurant and buffet. You don’t see too many places quite like this around.
When you come in, you get seated by a hostess just like at any sit-​down restaurant. You place a drink order, then are given a little stick with a number on it for your table or seat at the bar.
You go to the buffet line and get one medium sized black bowl and one small orange bowl. You choose as much fresh vegetables, noodles and rice as you can fit in the black bowl, and raw meat strips (beef, chicken or fish) in the small bowl. What’s then nice is there is a selection of different sauces and spices that you add.
I got a bowl strictly with vegetables and a small bowl of beef. After you finish filling your bowls, you leave it with the cooks at the woks and grill who do your stir fry. The bowl is brought to your seat. You can go back as many times as you want. I went back once.
The spice and sauce selections are really good, and I recommend going back for seconds and trying a whole different taste the second time. It’s like having two totally different small entrée dishes that you design yourself
The service is friendly and pretty good, but at the lunch hour when I went it took about 20 minutes for my second bowl to come back from the stir fry. Getting multiple bowls could be a time consuming affair if they are busy.
They have a bar where I sat and sell beer, wine, and cocktails.
I really like this place for lunch, but it doesn’t really seem to be the kind of place I would go for dinner. The $ 9.99 was OK for lunch, but I wouldn’t spend $ 13.99 for the dinner. With an iced tea, my lunch here before tip came to about $ 13.
This is a good place to get a reasonably healthy meal that you can design yourself.

This was my first time to this type of Korean/​Cambodian/​Thai type buffet. I’m glad I had colleagues with me to help guide me through the selection process.
They provide you with a wooden flag with your table’s number on it to use when selecting your food. You approach the buffet line with your plate/​bowl and select all the components of your meal. They have multiple selections of vegetables, protein, sauces, seasonings, spices to create whatever you want. I took some rice noodles, rice, tilapia, calamari, thai seasoning and oyster sauce to make my first meal. You then leave the bowl with your wooden flag in it. They prepare the food and bring it to your table.
For lunch, they charge $ 9.99. AYCE. The proteins include fish, pork, chicken, beef, and eggs. Just be careful how much sauce or seasoning you put on. It can be tricky.

If you ever have a group of people with different taste this would defiantly be the place to take them! Since they don’t have a set menu the customer is free to make whatever kind of dish they like.
My cousin was a vegetarian so it’s usually hard to find a place where we can all go especially for those of us who don’t like veggies. We decided to go here and it was great. She got to make many different types of vegetarian dishes while the rest of got to enjoy our meat filled ones.
I think my favorite thing about this place would be the fact that it gives you an opportunity to try new things. It allows you to be creative and experimental and try new things. You could try making some chicken Alfredo or you could go for more of Asian Thai flavor using the many different sauces & spices they have available. If you’re curious about something or how it taste you can add it to your dish, the best part is that if you don’t like it you can get up and redo it again as many times as you want! Plus they usually whip up your food fast.
But before you leave you have to try their chocolate cheesecake!!! I don’t normally like cheesecake but I decided to try theirs and I’m glad I did. It was a perfect combination of cheesecake & chocolate, neither one overdoing the other. And it was a pretty large proportion of delicious considering it was only like $ 5

3 stars is too low while 4 stars is high, but I’ll round up for this one.
This is a favorite at the office because there’s something for everybody. In a «buffet» line, you can start with noodles or rice (white or brown). Afterwards, there’s a great variety of veggies and other ingredients. Next, you can pick from a variety of sauces that aren’t just «Asian». Then, you can pick meat (s) or skip it if you’re a vegetarian; this section includes not just beef & chicken but also sausage, calamari, and tilapia. Finally, you leave your picks at the grill for someone to cook it all up for you!
Since you pick out the ingredients yourself, you can’t go wrong (unless you actually do; with great power comes great responsibility lol…)
They cook it up pretty fast, and service has always been solid. It’s good for both small & large groups because the place is spacious and has alot of seats. Maybe one legit knock for some people is the noise level, but it’s not that bad.
It’s $ 8.99 for a weekday lunch, which is a great deal for all you can eat. I wouldn’t pay $ 12.99 for dinner though.

Service was ok. .sat at the bar… fried cheesecake is the WORST! !! Taste just like a tortilla. .nothing but bread..

What a fun AYCE dining experience this was! I liked it and will probably be back when I’m in the area again. I’ve heard a lot of Chow Baby and didn’t know Big Chow was related to it. My friend took me here for dinner since he loves it here during his lunch breaks. I was confused at how it all works until he and the waitress helped me out.
You grab a black bowl, fill it with the carb options that ranges from rice, flat noodles, pasta, egg noodles, and lo mein noodles. I absolutely hate eating rice, so I avoided that option the entire time. I managed to enjoy the flat noodles the most. After choosing your carb you load up with all the veggies options and sauces they have. Then there is the protein bar. They have you grab a smaller bowl to fill your protein up that ranges from chicken, flounder, beef, pork, eggs, and calamari. I loved getting the beef, egg, and calamari the most. The hardest part for me was choosing the sauces. there were plenty to choose from and is a bit overwhelming but fun at the same time. You are pretty much customizing your meal to how you would like it to taste. So definitely won’t be the chef’s fault if you don’t like your creation. Besides the stir fry option, you can have them turn it into a curry or vegetable soup also. I tried the curry option and disliked it. Bummed since that made me not want to make anymore bowls since I was getting full. I managed to enjoy my first 2 bowls though. Start out small if you want to try a variety of combinations. I came on a Friday evening and they were busy but got seated immediately. The place is very spacious which is a huge plus. It takes almost 10 – 15 minutes for each of the stir fry to come out to your table after you give it to the cooks. Depends how busy it is will prolong the wait time for your entrée. Our waitress was very tired I noticed, but still managed to keep a smile while running around all night to help other tables. For 12.99 AYCE stir fry is a steal. Try it out once and you’ll probably want to come back just to see what you can come up with. I gave this place a 3 stars because overall I wasn’t blown away by how everything tastes. It was a good dining experience, but don’t expect superb quality.

First time I have eaten here. Came in a group to celebrate one of our family friend’s birthday. Had roughly 30 or so people. While the food was good and affordable (we had the unlimited bowl line — $ 12.99 per person I believe) and our server was exceptional, there were a lot of things that turned me off about this place and made me not want to come back on my own or on a date. First when we walked in we just stood there waiting for someone to help us. The maître d’ or who I assume was the hostess finally came up. We stated the party we were with but she had absolutely no idea what party that was which I thought was strange because knowing the names of parties is something that hostess should know. Once we found our party we just kind of sat there not really sure of what to do. We finally were told to go to the line with our bowl fill it up and give it to the cooks, but what they omitted to tell us was that you are supposed to write your name on the back of your stick that you put in your food when you get finished going through the line. This would have been a great thing to know so that when they came to our table we didn’t look at each other crazy. Overall the food was good depending on what you choose, mess up just get a new bowl, but not my first choice to eat.

I always have fun dining here because if you don’t like the food you only have yourself to blame! LOL
They need to work on the service (we always seem to wait 20 minutes for our beverages).

Came here strictly for drinks on a weekday with my boyfriend after a casual dinner elsewhere. Just wanted to kick back a few martinis or dessert drinks and call it an early night as we both worked the following day.
I asked the bartender (a very young girl made up like if she was going to a Vegas nightclub) for the red velvet martini and she said they didn’t have it. My boyfriend went for the mojito which was on sale for $ 3.50 and I had the pear martini. My drink was delicious but my boyfriend’s was pretty terrible. We were having a good time so we decided to order another round. My boyfriend asked for me to order for him this time and see if I had better luck. I ordered another pear martini for myself and some sort of piña colada frozen thing with an extra floater. The bartender questioned me and gave my boyfriend a face as in «that’s not a manly drink.» I assured her that’s what we wanted with a smile and she then asked him again if he was sure.
I don’t have an issue with bartenders being flirty (that’s how they make their money and I’m all bout the cash) but don’t question my choices. Not in a restaurant or in the real world. If I am paying and say I want coffee blended with cucumbers made into a cocktail, your job as a bartender is to make it. I was not a happy camper. We finished our drinks (which were great the second time around, by the way) and left. The floater I requested never made itself to the piña colada. I left her a 20% tip so it’s highly unlikely she will ever know her behavior was unwelcome and unprofessional but nevertheless, will never return.