Cooking up camaraderie

For Heather Nygaard, manager of Mongolian BBQ Express in Moscow, work is a place where the employees like their jobs and enjoy each other's company, and the customers take notice.

"It's a place where you like to be with your coworkers, and people can tell the difference," she said.

This month, the restaurant's nine employees are celebrating their 15th anniversary of cooking and serving up customer-created combinations of vegetables, meat, noodles, rice and sauces in the Eastside Marketplace.

Nygaard has been a fan of Mongolian BBQ Express since its establishment in 1998, when she was a student at Moscow High School. She said she would fuel up at the restaurant before heading out to compete in basketball and softball games.

She graduated from MHS in 2001 and worked at the restaurant while she studied creative writing at the University of Idaho, but then left Moscow for a few years. When she returned, she said, she found it "didn't have the same vibe" that she remembered.

Nygaard became manager in June 2012 after "the person training me didn't show up" one day, she said, and she subsequently hired almost an entirely new staff. With the exception of one person who moved away from Moscow, she said all of those employees are still working at the restaurant more than a year later.

"We're getting ready to take group photos" and set up a Facebook page, she said.

She said she also worked to make Mongolian BBQ Express a cleaner, more welcoming place for sit-down diners and take-out customers.

"Over the last year, I've gotten so many compliments on how clean the place looks," she said.

Nygaard said the restaurant offers friendly service and quality food ingredients at a good price.

"Everything's really fresh. It's a really nice, healthy place to eat," she said. "It's also kind of nice for people who are diabetic or are gluten-free."

The Mongolian BBQ Express experience begins at a buffet table filled with 16 types of vegetables and either five or seven types of meat, depending on whether it's lunch or dinner hours. Customers choose a bowl - small, medium or large - and then are free to pile on whatever ingredients they like. As long as everything fits in the bowl, they're good to go.

"It's all about the noodles last," Nygaard said of the best bowl-filling strategy.

Then comes the sauce, which customers add before handing over the bowls for the chefs to cook on a large, circular grill near the front of the restaurant. Sauces include hoisin, ginger, lemon, curry, Mongolian, sweet and sour, house barbecue, garlic and sriracha, in addition to sesame seed oil and burgundy cooking wine.

Each meal also comes with rice and a fortune cookie.

Lunch prices, from 11 a.m.-4:30 p.m., are $7.95 for a small bowl, $8.95 for a medium bowl and $11.95 for a large bowl. Dinner prices, from 4:30 p.m. to close, are $8.95 for a small, $10.95 for a medium and $13.95 for a large. Children younger than 10 are allowed to share a meal with a paying adult, or they can get their own small bowl for $4.95.

In addition to setting up a restaurant Facebook page that includes suggestions for ingredient and sauce combinations, Nygaard said she hopes to persuade more local high school and university athletic teams to stop in before or after practices or games.

"We have a huge back room that seats more than 100, and there's no fee for it," she said, adding the restaurant also hosts quite a few birthday parties.

Nygaard said it's been nice to work at Mongolian BBQ Express for so long, getting to know regular customers and other mall employees.

And at the heart of the restaurant are her coworkers - the "MBB-Crew," she said - who demonstrated their kindness earlier this year when they covered for her after she was in a bad car accident.

"It brought tears to my eyes," she said. "It was so amazing they did that for me."

Mongolian BBQ Express is located at 1420 S. Blaine St. in the Eastside Marketplace and can be reached by phone at (208) 882-7723.

Holly Bowen can be reached at (208) 883-4639, or by email to hbowen@dnews.com. Follow her on Twitter @DailyNewsHolly.