CJ’s Stir It Up

This place is the coolest great food an great workers luv this place would love for people to get over the picky side an appreciate how people work hard an do their best

6 months later:
They play background music, provides better environment. They’ve toned down the wal-​mart lighting and they serve the table… So you don’t have to have your kids/​family standing around waiting for your order.
The staff are kind and the servers now bring you drinks. The La Quinta site still has a better feel and flow… Go to each and you’ll understand the slight differences.
Indio is learning what customer service looks like and if that continues our friends and family may enjoy more meals at this location.
(For comparison see older review and what others have mentioned too)

Place was a bit disorganized, I’ve been to a lot on mong places for dinner this was the first that have you leave your plate with them and you have to go sit down so you can’t watch them cook your food… And when they do bring it there not even sure who’s plate is who’s! I’ve always been used to watching them cook for you then them handing the plate to you. But I guess it’s different here, only reason I gave 2 star … Because my husbands stir-​fry wasn’t cooked long enough the noodles were stuck together and hard. My food was good. But because he didn’t enjoy it we will probably never eat there again.

Very clean and friendly. The service was Excellent! Our server was on top of her game even during dinner, she kept a nice smile and didn’t neglect one table! The price is great! The food was excellent! The cooks are even very friendly! Highly recommend, especially during happy hour!

Tried this place out while vacationing for stagecoach. Best Mongolian grill I have ever been to! great service and amazing food. A bowl at lunch is about $ 10 or all you can eat for $ 13. Pretty great deal!

Good, fresh food! A great value for your money! The mango Sorbet was good too. All you can eat for $ 14 is great but a first helping is generous enough. Will definitely return!

My experience here overall was good. I did what the host recommended and got a few smaller sized plates to get my $ 14 worth, since they stop doing single dishes after 5pm. Our server was really attentive and the staff was great. The food was tasty. The turnaround time after putting my bowl on the counter to be cooked was fast 2 of 3 times. The other time it took 10 – 15 minutes as it was starting to get busy and the usual cook had left for lunch or something and the covering cook was much slower.
Overall, it’s expensive. My husband and I threw down close to $ 50 (including a tip and incl. one beer and one wine on happy hour) which is overpriced in my opinion.
Would we go back? Maybe…

Hands down the very best stir fry this side of the Orange County line. Awesome prices and very high quality ingredients. Ask for Kevin, he’ll make sure you are well taken care of.

Definitely something different!
You’re given 1 medium sized bowl to take to the frozen buffet. You pick from 4 different meats, several different veggies, side ingredients like tofu or baby corns, noodles or bean sprouts, and finally you any combination of 16 sauces for taste or spice (make sure to get at least 8 scoops of any combination). Once you and your group are ready you leave your bowls at the chefs station along with the group size and your table number and the server brings you your bowls when they’re steaming and ready.
Everyone’s gotta try this place at least once!
The restaurant did have some issues though.
The buffet is way too small. I’m 5’10″ and was practically shoving the other people in my party aside just to prepare my plate. Please make it bigger and please do something about the glass that makes it difficult to get ingredients.
The floors were mopped, but were sticky from whatever they used to clean it with. The sound was quite unpleasant…
The place only had about 6 or 7 groups of people but it seemed the cooks were over worked. I think they may need another cook or 2. Maybe even a floater that goes from the kitchen to the griddle when need be.
The bowls were too small for just 1 serving. I understand it’s an all you can eat establishment, but you get a less than desirable amount from 1 trip.
Overall, I’m going back there next time my family and friends want to go out for dinner. It was fun. :)

Absolutely gruesome read the other 1 star posts. the worst part was our waitress identified herself as the owner and proceeded to charge us 3.95 for a doggy bag ‚“brutal” The meat looked like soilent green frozen strips of something. it seems the demographic in the east valley is accustomed to poor service and below average ingredients.

Came here for dinner last night with a group of friends. Love the La Quinta location and this one seems larger and definitely brighter as the lighting in LQ reminds me of a dive bar… Dinner is all you can eat and we didn’t have a problem making that happen. Waiter was nice and attentive, although he forgot our rice but not a big deal as rice is just a filler and not conducive if you really want all you can eat! Overall good eats! I’ll be back!

OMG! Great place to come, waitress was so nice and had a great personality. Tried the mongolian beef stir… Sorry no pictures, ate it quickly. I highly recommend it!

Horrible service!!! Waited 10 minutes just to be greeted by waiter. Took another 5 minutes to get our bowls. When we made our bowls and took them to the grill to be made, 2 employees were standing there looking around as if we were not waiting for service (no one else was waiting).
Once we got back to our table our drinks were still not there, took another 5 minutes to receive them approx 25 – 30 total time to get our drinks from when get sat down.
Just an overall bad experience, I’d understand a busy night with no staff, but it was a slow night and approx 7 employees working the dinning area! Save your money and take it to a place where it is appreciated!!!

I have gone to the la quinta location many times and I can see people’s comparison between the two. However, if you remember when the la Arriba location opened the walls were bare and they didn’t have their liquor license yet and now the location is great as many have pointed out.
But for me I come here at least twice a month and have always been greeted with a smile and shown to my table and while it takes a while sometimes I understand because I come during the dinner rush. The hostess stephanie is kind and is apologetic when it’s taking a little long. While I do believe the location needs a little work, in the past month it has changed drastically and I am very happy with the changes being made.
Nicole the waitress is always checking on me and has a smile on her face and is highly professional. I have read that some people don’t like the fact that they explain the process if you’ve never been there but I think it’s helpful especially with the sauces and knowing and understanding what’s in them.
I’m optimistic that this location will continue to improve and be as great as the lq location. I will continue to go to enjoy the food and the service from the staff.

Stopped by for lunch and we were very pleased with the selection available and the excellent friendly service from Adriana. Every ingredient was fresh and the restaurant was spotless. We will stop here in the future. Wish there were more restaurants like this in our neighborhood.

We decided to eat here, despite some of the negative reviews, and I’m glad we did because it was delicious!
It was pretty empty at 8 pm on a Thursday night, so there wasn’t any wait. I listened to the server’s recommendation of adding garlic to the «most popular» sauce and I loved it! I can’t wait to come back to try some more adventurous combinations.

This place is about as good as any other Mongolian place. You’ve got a variety of veggies, meats and sauces to top with noodles and give to the cook to «stir it up» for you. The staff is also very friendly.
I don’t understand why people complain about their food… I mean… YOU’RE responsible for how your dish ultimately tastes. From the time you start filling up that bowl, it’s all you my friend.
Anyway, they have standard veggies: broccoli, carrots, tiny corn, water chestnuts, etc. Standard meats: frozen chicken, beef, pork and lamb. Standard sauces: House, hot, sesame, lemon, vinegar, garlic, etc. They only offer one type of noodle: standard flour noodles.
They also offer you white or brown rice to go with your food and provide fortune cookies at the end.
The cost is about $ 10.00 per person, add about $ 3.00 to make it AYCE (not bad really).
The only issue we had was that the mandarin oranges were spoiled and I didn’t find out until after my daughter and niece had eaten a few, however, after telling the waiter, he immediately checked on them, came back to our table and apologized and brought us «fresh» ones to replace the spoiled ones. On the way out, the restaurant manager also apologized and took full responsibility for the mishap. Overall, I thought this place was great, and a good change of pace from all your standard drive through places in the area.

Shaking my head in disbelief …
I just couldn’t believe how bad this place was. I didn’t think that anyone could fumble a Mongolian Grill restaurant so badly, but these people have definitely achieved it.
I’m thankful that a new restaurant has opened in North Indio for sure, but after this initial visit — I will never step foot in here again.
First, knowing this place was new, when the waitress asked me if I had been there before, and I said that I hadn’t, I then had to sit through a really excruciating two-​minute lecture about how the Mongolian Grill process works. I’m in my 40’s. I did not need, nor want to hear this. If I had asked fine, but I clearly did not. I’ve been eating at Mongolian Grills for 30+ years throughout Los Angeles and SoCal, and never encountered such nonsense.
Next, as others have stated, we were brought a very small bowl (one each) which I knew was the start of a very bad relationship. These bowls are embarressingly small. I get that owners are trying to have some portion control, but at $ 13.95 for all you can eat, it’s almost theft. Then telling people you’re going to charge them an additional $ 4.00 for uneaten food is adding insult to injury.
Then, after the process of an inattentive host having finally seated us, finally got drinks and finally were released to go fill our bowls after the lecture, I had to navigate a buffet station that looked like it was built, for and by garden gnomes. I’m not a tall person but I couldn’t fit my arms under the glass properly and it just created an unnecessary mess. I almost gave up and walked out at this point. They need to raise the metal arms on the buffett station. Quickly. Clearly, I’m not the only one who has noticed this.
Did I mention the frozen beef was completely empty, by the way? No one bothered refilling it the entire time I was there. The hostess was complaining to our waitress the entire time within eye-​sight, and I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
The sauces had no flavour at all. Whoever thinks that they do, are plain fooling themselves. Sure the hot sauce was hot, but everything else, outside of the sesame oil, tasted watery. If you think hot sauce is what’s important, you don’t know much about Mongolian.
I get these folks are trying to make a more upscale experience with this Mongolian Grill location, but then having to add a tip for food that’s already overpriced and more expensive than other Mongolian locations is outright depressing. $ 11 should be the cap here.
You should be able to:
1. Walk through the door, find a table and then make your own way up to the buffet. No angry looking, distracted hostess. No lectures from the waitress. Nada. Paying should be high tech and quick. Not this.
2. They should have a waitress distributing drinks during the paypoint right at the outset. Beer, soda, boba, whatever.
3. Be able to use two bowls, as most people do, one for meat, one for veggies and pay a reasonable price.
4. This is not all you can eat, with a $ 4 surcharge, thus AYCE needs to go away as does the surcharge.
5. You want seafood? Guess what? It’s extra, and you don’t get fair return for the added expense.
6. Put an egg on the grill? Didn’t see it here. Sad. Just embarressing really.
Sadly, these folks overbuilt this location and spent way too much money developing the restaurant. Two full grills? I’ve been to hundreds of Mongolian restaurants, and there was never a need for two grills. Especially here. It’s been noted by others that they’re not even using both, even during peak times. The reason? Having more chefs for two grills is just not profitable. Sorry. Sad, but true.
This restaurant suffers from numerous missteps. I was excited when I saw the construction, but it just wasn’t worth the wait. And $ 15 for stir fry noodles is insane. I don’t see this place surviving very long.
Avoid.
For the record, this place brought me out of my Unilocal Retirement.

This place is completely different than the lq place. They are under staffed had to wait thirty minutes to get our bowls and another ten minutes to get our drinks.
There are hidden costs if you eat to much. Really then I guess it’s not all you can eat then.

So although I’m excited to have something new to the north Indio area this place is sadly a place I do not desire to come back to.
The bowls that they give you, regardless if you’re getting the all you can eat or the one time trip are extremely small and you only get one. Even better yet if you go for dinner you get the exact same bowl with the exact same food but for a cost substantially more than the lunch time menu. It actually makes no sense.
Because the bowls are so small the consumers to no fault of their own end up spilling food all over the counter and it drops to the floor. To obtain the sauces you practically have to put your shoulder underneath the bar area to utilize it.
There was two areas to grill the food. It is a fairly large place however the line was extremely long and they were only using one side of the restaurant making the experience that more unsatisfying to deal with. Long lines and long waits.
The gentleman stir frying the food should have been wearing gloves for sanitary reasons but we’re not which was also concerning to me.
I ended up getting lunch with one serving no drink and the bill was $ 10 without a tip. I was still hungry but did not want to wait in line for another 30 minutes to get another small bowl and wait for the line to grill it.
Just not worth all the hype or hassle.