DIY dinners

Some of you may remember the restaurant in Sea Point in the early ’80s that was based on the Mongolian barbeque concept. (If you can remember the name please let me know, it’s driving me scatty!) My friends and I adored it – you got to choose only the vegetables, meat, fi sh or chicken you liked, in a ratio you fancied, and then you could get creative and cook it yourself with any number of sauces and fl avourings. It was a lot of fun for the diners and, now that I think about it, nothing less than brilliant on the owners’ part. I mean, nobody could really complain if they didn’t like the food; they had, after all, cooked it themselves! But that was a long time ago and I’ve never come across anything like it since.

Well, until recently, when I went to a birthday party at Leila’s Eatery, a restaurant in George where the food was Mongolian barbeque style – I’m sold all over again, such a pity there’s nowhere like it in my neck of the woods.

Anyway, the concept got me thinking that the whole idea of DIY dining should herald a new wave of dinner parties. Think about it. In our incredibly time-strapped lives it removes the need for hours in the kitchen, eliminates the chance of any dinner-party performance anxiety and associated stress (and the terribly expensive medication you may need to calm your nerves) and it provides its own source of entertainment – pure genius.

Okay, so the Mongolian thing is a tad diffi cult at home, unless for some unfathomable reason you own a hibachi table.

But there is the fantastically retro fondue – gooey cheese and bread, oilcooked meat, seafood and vegetables or even a broth-based version. The latter is Asian-inspired and terribly healthy – a very good homemade stock serves as the cooking liquid in which all manner of fi sh and vegetables can be poached before being dipped into the likes of sweet Indonesian soy, sweet-chilli and ponzu sauces. It’s probably the kind of thing Gwyneth Paltrow and her gang of girls would indulge in – terribly new age and cleansing, and in all fairness really quite delicious!

There’s DIY sushi – serve loads of über-fresh sliced fi sh and other seafood, thinly sliced crunchy veg, ripe avo, loads of perfectly cooked sushi rice (no mean feat), soy, mayo, wasabi, pickled ginger; and let guests make their own nigiri sushi and other concoctions. You could of course also provide sheets of nori (seaweed) and a rolling mat or two and let them roll maki.

If you’re lucky enough to own a pizza oven, I think this DIY thing is de rigueur, and if you haven’t already caught on to it then you’re either a little slow or a sucker for punishment.

I suppose you could use the same concept at a Sunday braai – encourage guests to make up their own kebabs and then braai them over the coals – but this may be taking the idea a little too far – you decide.

The point is that all of these DIY dinner parties require a bit of creativity on the part of the diners (always a good thing) and the whole interactive thing is great for bonding, a lot of fun and more often the source of many a hilarious anecdote or fond memory. Think of it is as a teambuilding dinner (unless that sounds a little ra-ra and alarmingly American).

But if the notion of inviting folk round to cook their own dinner doesn’t sit comfortably with you, then I suppose it’s back to old-fashioned hard slog for you... I, on the other hand, intend never to cook for a soul again!