Iron Grill — Restaurant in Covington

As a Mongolian connoisseur, I’ll throw out my 2 cents:

Bowl selection: Lunch special is one big bowl (Almost always enough for a big appetite). There are small bowl and all you can eat options.

Layout: Vegetables - Noodles - Sauces - Oils - meat at counter.

Vegetables: About 20 types, with mainstay carrots, celery, tomatoes, broccoli, spinach, water chestnuts, and pineapples. No corn, peas, beans or oranges or other sweet fruits.

Noodles: Nothing really out there. Yakisoba, spicy yakisoba, rice and flat noodles. Noodles after vegetables allows for a higher bowl stack in my experience.

Sauces: Decent spread of like 16 give or take. Ladled right into the bowl over the top. Pretty standard here.

Oils: Sesame and olive I believe. Right at the end to lock down your flavors (always lock down your flavors with 1-2 scoops).

Meats: They portion with a small soup bowl. Seems to always be enough and always fresh, not frozen, making the meat taste a lot better at the end. Chicken, beef, pork, but also some seafood and lamb. You can add another portion or meat if you want for a small charge (on the individual bowls like the lunch special).

Cooking: They’re pretty solid. Always get it all cooked through, no significant charting. My only gripe is they like to add water halfway through the cook which washes out your sauces somewhat. You can have white rice after they finish. I forgot is they offer wraps because I never get them.

After cook: This is where Iron Grill is the best I’ve seen. They have peanuts and sesame seeds, and Siracha/Soy/etc which is great, but where they stand out is a heated Peanut Sauce!, heated mushroom sauce, heated Mongolian sauce and I think a teriyaki sauce. These after sauces are the bomb!

Drinks: Lunch special comes with a refillable soda and they have a standard fountain. Other drink options are there.

Plates are solid, black and square and your sauces don’t leak out. Standard metal silverware. Napkin dispenser at every table.

Always seating available and you get through pretty quick. Bathrooms on site. Self bus with tubs near the door. No hounding about uneaten food.

Pricing is standard, with the Lunch special being a cheap option in my opinion for what you get.

Overall: I’d say it’s the best Mongolian in the Seattle/Tacoma area at the moment even if you have to drive out to Covington for it (which my mother in law and I do repeatedly). National competition wise, I’d say the after sauces make up for the vegetable selection, so I’d put it at Ghengis level and Huhot level, but below BDs, the best...

Was extremely disappointed after my experience eating at iron grill today. I’ve been coming here for the last two years and normally have a great experience. This evening when my boyfriend and myself went in to make our entree’s we could feel the woman working behind the desk glaring with a very annoyed attitude while we prepped our meals. When we finished & approached the counter she was very unclear with us that we apparently overfilled our bowls. She proceeded to prep our 2 meals into 4 to go boxes and then decided to charge us for two large bowls & two mediums.... if you have ever been here you know this is normally never done this way so when I asked why she told us that “our food wouldn’t fit in each box and would overflow and we needed to be charged for it”. Not wanting to fuss over it we still proceeded to then pay $50 for both meals all together & I still tipped $10 regardless of how offputting this woman was to us (pretty positive she is the new owner). We waited for our food noticed that the cooks scraped a good amount of it off the grill and I figured she was correct that both meals were going to fill all 4 to go boxes. We got in the car, got half way home & I decided to open them to only find that each of the 4 boxes was literally halfway filled with food. They also did not mix our veggies and noodles and separated them among the boxes with everything extremely undercooked. I am not normally one to complain as I work in the hospitality industry myself but I was appalled by this woman’s attitude towards us and then had the nerve to charge us for two all you can eats when we barely were given enough food for 1. We called very upset trying to speak with the manager and the woman on the phone proceeded to argue and yell over the phone. Iron grill will never have my business again. Very sad to see a great local business be under such poor management...

I went today with four other family members and dropped 70 bucks on lunch. I have been to this place many many times and have easily spent over $1,000 here in the last few years. The food police atmosphere has always been a turn off but I have dealt with it until now. Three of the members of my party ordered a normal meal and two ordered all you can eat. My son who is nine had the all-you-can-eat option but complained of being full after having his second serving prepared. From my perspective I had paid for at least 1 second serving for each person who ordered all you can eat. One of my sons who is entitled to a to go box because he did not order all you could eat went up to get a box. He returned to the table with the Box. Five minutes later the the newer older lady came over to our table and snatched the empty box up from my nine-year-old saying loudly that to go boxes were not allowed. I understand the policy but I think it should be exercised with discretion given that we were very frequent customers and had never violated their food police rule before. When I went up to tell her that I would never come back with my family again, she proceeded to shout across the restaurant as I left that I should have understood the rules. Again they have lost a very frequent customer over a dollars...