Have It Your Way

By Lisa Takeuchi Cullen Sunday, Feb. 22, 2004
    • The ladies were stumped. Cheryl Spangler, Valeria Borunda-Jameson and Susan Puckett, three college-admissions workers on a training visit to Florence, Ky., had sauntered into a local barbecue joint called Chung Kiwha. But instead of sauce-slathered mutton served up from the kitchen, they saw a buffet of uncooked meats and vegetables. Instead of knives and forks, they were given large scissors, chopsticks and metal tongs. No candle flickered at their table, but a bucket of fiery wood charcoal hissed in the tabletop grill pit. Chung Kiwha served barbecue, all right — cook-it-yourself Korean barbecue. "I didn't realize there were restaurants like this," marveled Spangler to her friends, who hail from Knoxville, Tenn., "and I worked in restaurants for 20 years."

    The secret is out, thanks to the growing popularity of restaurants where the customer is the chef. Long a staple of immigrant communities in big cities, restaurants where diners chop, grill, boil or dip their food are hot in the heartland. St. Paul, Minn., has Thai hot-pot cooking. Indianapolis, Ind., has Japanese shabu-shabu (another type of hot pot). A pizzeria in Las Vegas lets customers roll the dough. Do-it-yourself s'mores are big in Houston. A national fondue chain is booming.


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    Why would people bother going out just to cook their own meal? "Americans want control," says Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of research for the National Restaurant Association. "The cook-it-yourself experience embodies the quintessential American values of freedom of choice and independence." Riehle also points to a widening curiosity about immigrant cuisines. With families spending 46% of their food budget on meals outside the home, family members miss the cooking experience — sort of. "It's the Betty Crocker cake-mix thing," says Pamela Parseghian, executive food editor at Nation's Restaurant News. "People still want to add the eggs and stir the bowl. Psychologically, they want to be a little involved."

    Whatever the reason, plenty of people will pay to play with food. At the Vinoklet Winery in Cincinnati, Ohio, couples laugh and chat at the vast communal grill while poking their slabs of mahimahi or steak. Kreso Mikulic, the mustachioed owner, bellows out advice: "A knife! You have to cut it with a knife." Setting their first date here helped kindle romance two years ago for Ali Dehner and Jeffrey Pfirrmann. "It was a good icebreaker," says Dehner.

    CoCoRo Restaurant of Chicago has long served shabu-shabu to expatriate Japanese businessmen, says owner Katsuhiro Niki. But lately, on weekends, 80% of his customers are non-Japanese. Harmony Watling discovered shabu-shabu during her honeymoon in Bora-Bora and had "so much fun" using chopsticks to swirl paper-thin slices of beef in the bubbling cauldron of water (the Japanese word shabu-shabu comes from the splashing sound). Local reviews call shabu-shabu "great date food," which puzzles Niki. "It's not for couples," he says. His wife Hitomi explains, "It's messy."

    The mess was partly what caused the at-home fondue trend to flame out in the late 1970s. But at the Melting Pot, all the prep work is done for you — which is one reason this chain, based in Tampa, Fla., has doubled in size to 70 locations in the past three years. Not every diner embraces the experience. Dragged in by enthusiastic wives, "men often sit with their arms crossed ... that is, until we fill them up with good wine," says Will Layfield, owner of the Melting Pot in Westwood, N.J. At the Vinoklet, diner Greg Schafer grouses, "I don't cook at home, and if I'm going to pay good money, I want someone to do the cooking for me." What's more, do-it-yourself dining isn't cheap. At the Minturn Country Club in Minturn, Colo., Kobe beef costs $49.95--uncooked. Still, restaurateurs insist that the customer knows best. "Who knows what to them is rare?" says Mikulic, owner of Vinoklet. "This way, if they screw it up, I get no complaints." Back at Chung Kiwha in Florence, patron Puckett sees it this way: "We don't have to clean up, do we?"