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Green Bowl
Rating Details »
- Hours:
Mon-Thu. 11:00 a.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Fri. 11:00 a.m. - 9:30 p.m.
Sat. 8:30 a.m. - 9:30 p.m.
Sun. 8:30 a.m. - 9:00 p.m.
- Parking:
- Street
- Accepts Credit Cards:
- Yes
- Price Range:
-
$
- Attire:
- Casual
- Good for Groups:
- Yes
- Good for Kids:
- Yes
- Delivery:
- No
- Take-out:
- Yes
- Waiter Service:
- Yes
- Wheelchair Accessible:
- Yes
- Outdoor Seating:
- No
- Good for:
- Lunch
- Alcohol:
- None
15 reviews for Green Bowl
What a cool concept. If you like to be creative when eating this is the place to visit. How it works each customer is given a stick with your table number on it, then you go to the food table and do as follows:
1) Grab an empty bowl
2) Pick your ingredients (IE. mushrooms, watercheshnuts, jalapeno, mixed greens, eggs, etc....)
3) Select the type of noodle you want
4) Now heres the fun part..Select what type of sauce you want, they have over 20 types of sauces to mix and match and don't worry there are several chalk boards that will give you recommendations on how to mix these sauces.
5) choose what kind of meat you like by inserting a colored stick into your bowl. You can also choose if you want your noodles made as a soup, which I would not recommend.
The food is how you make it so if you don't like your food, blame yourself cuz you don't have the culinary arts in you : )
Prices are good and service is good. If your hungry and its busy here it make take some time to get your plate.
I've been craving a big bowl of vegetables ever since I arrived in State College, which basically makes the Green Bowl the answer to all of my prayers. The Green Bowl is an all you can eat buffet style Mongolian BBQ restaurant that allows you almost complete control over your meal. Its a bit confusing the first time you walk in, but the staff is more than happy to help you through your first visit.
Each customer is given a wooden stick with a number in order to identify your particular stir fry. You can fill up your bowl with all sorts of different vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, bok choy, carrots, zucchini, onions, etc. Its pretty exciting after spending weeks living on pizza, burgers and iceberg lettuce salads. The buffet is also equipped with at least 20 different sauces that you can mix and match to your own particular tastes. I like a combo on super hot, hoision, peanut, and extra chili sauce. That's right, I'm a spicy kind of lady. At the end of the buffet you pick the a colored stick to correspond with the meat of your choice. Your bowl is left at the end of the counter, and an expert stir fryer cooks your meal on a large hibachi style grill.
The tricky part is figuring out the correct balance of veggies to sauce. Good things is all you can eat! Go bonkers. Try something new! I've only been in State College for a little over a week and I've been here two times.... I may have developed an addiction.
Been here a couple of times in the last year. It's like a Mongolian BBQ buffet-style restaurant. Seating is quick. You grab a green bowl and put all the ingredients that you want the chef to cook. I usually choose some corn, spinach, egg noodles, pineapple, mushrooms, eggs, and sprouts.
Then you can pick your choice of about a dozen different sauces. Bourbon BBQ is my favorite, with a little bit of hot chili and teryaki. Finally, you get to choose either chicken, beef, or shrimp for your main ingredient. A few minutes later, a waiter brings out your cooked dish.
Lunch is about $12 bucks. Pretty good deal, considering the food and that it's all-you-can-eat. There are some coupons you can find online as well.
Mehhhh... Nothing special. Typical mongolian bbq place and typical State College Restaurant. This place does have a good selection of ingredients and it's always fun to experiment to see what interesting tastes I can come up with. Soon, I will be an expert in Asian fusion. A bit expensive for mongolian bbq but it does look nicer than most of the hole in the walls I usually go to. It's all you can eat but it's really greasy so if you eat too much, you will start to feel sick.
Used to be one of my favorite places up til when I graduated in 2004.
Haven't found another noodle house quite like it.
From the sounds of others, it seems the the quality MAY have gone downhill, but it used to be great.
The Green Bowl is a nice departure from the pizza and fried food places that seem to dominate State College eating. The Mongolian BBQ is a cool enough concept to get people in the doors and the fact that you can create your own bowl, and watch it prepared, is good enough for me. I like experimenting with various food combinations and seeing what new sort of concoction I can come up with next, without completely burning off my tongue. The prices are fair and the small bowl of rice that you receive in the beginning of the meal is a pleasant little substitute for the bread, or even fried noodles, that other restaurants have been giving out for years.
I had a wonderful breakfast here on a Saturday morning. The veggies and protein items went into a very tasty custom omelette, and being able to custom pick the fruit and sweets to go into a pancake was yummy. Friendly service and a reasonable price made this place a winner in my book.
This is a simple buffet-style place which cooks your food fresh for you. I like being able to select what veggies and sauces I want to have. The multiple options, however, make it difficult to get a good combo---often times you mix the wrong sauce with certain vegetables and the taste is bland at best. They should have more recommendations for what sauces to use with certain veggies. Vegans and vegetarians: ask the cook to cook your food in a separate wok, off the main grill.
Given that it's all-you-can-eat, don't load up on vegetables in your first bowl, because the bowls are small and you'll generally end up being full after one dish. Better to make multiple small bowls, that way you can get a better range of the sauces and veggies.
I like that they offer brown rice as an option. The price for weekdays is decent, but the price jacks up almost 40% on the weekends, even though nothing changes in terms of service, food or your ability to eat like a champ.
I really didn't like this place. Not being a local, when I saw it from the outside I thought it looked good but when I went inside I saw it was some kind of Mongolian BBQ deal. I thought alright haven't had Mongolian BBQ in a while I can work with this.
The veggies were pretty sorry looking though so I picked varieties that were frozen since they looked wilted. I also added lots of tofu but it was irritating that they were in HUGE pieces so as to taste like giant chunks of nothing after they are cooked.
I wound up also putting noodles in and using lots of sauce to try to ensure it had flavor. After it was cooked I noticed that it had hardly any flavor and my grandma who had used rice noodles in her dish was left with a gelatinous clump of rice noodles that had molded together in the cooking process. When all was said and done they had managed to make even Mongolian BBQ suck.
I went to this place a lot...mostly because I knew somebody who worked there and I never paid for anything, not even once, but I would have gone anyway (just not as often).
You could fill your belly to the breaking point with vegetables...mom would be proud. I usually skipped the meat as that seemed to adversely affect the cooking job on the veggies, but a little tofu and hot sauce and you are in business.
How fabulous is this place!
Basically you pick everything you want - veggies, sauces, nuts, etc, and the meat you want, and they cook it there for you. It's like a giant hibachi kindaish. Yes, kindaish.
The service was a bit slow at lunch - and we went early. It was nearly impossible to finish in under an hour, and that was at 1130. I can't imagine having a quick lunch at peak time.
The mango chili is great- but put more than their recommended 1-2 scoops, at least 3.
I finally tried Green Bowl. Heard about it a few times. The best part of it is that it's a great deal (all you can eat for about $8 lunch or $11 dinner). You basically put all the ingredients (including sauces) you want into a bowl, put a stick into your food indicating the type of meat you want added (also if you want it made into soup), and hand it over to be cooked for you.
Okay, it's a good bargain for students, the service was really nice, it's a good concept. But it's not good food. I know there are people out there who love it and I'm glad it's there for you, but I either want someone to expertly cook my food for me (instead of throwing my food onto the griddle all at once) or else, I'd want to cook it all myself so it can be made the way I like it. But this in-the-middle thing is unsatisfying. I can't mess with this when I'm hungry!
For example, if I put broccoli, mushrooms, garlic, zucchini and shrimp into my plate, I'd want you to cook my garlic in some oil, then throw in the shrimp, then the mushrooms and zucchini, and then the broccoli which should have been dropped in some hot water to cook halfway until it's turn on the griddle. Unfortunately, my dish came out with mushrooms and zucchinis that were almost completely shriveled from being overcooked in the sauce, topped with raw broccoli.
Next, I tried making a noodle soup. I don't know what kind of broth the soup is made in, but it wasn't good. It had no character or flavor to speak of. Was it a veggie-based soup? Was any stock of any kind used to make it, or was it just the result of boiling vegetables and meats all day? Maybe I was supposed to put in my own soy sauce or salt into it? I don't know, but I just felt depressed. Plus there was a peanut in my soup. I didn't put one in my bowl. Oh well.
My third attempt at being full was a simple tomatoes, eggs, shrimps, and green onions. I added my own salt & pepper after it was cooked. Paired with my rice, it was a more basic version of fried rice that I make at home. Um, why was I paying for this again?
The shrimp is the tiny kind, about the size of a dime -- maybe even a nickel. I was scared to get any tofu because it was just a big crumbly mess.
It was a clean establishment with very professional & hardworking staff wearing uniforms and all that, but the food quality left a lot to be desired. I think I'll need some inspiration before going back here.
This place is kind of pricey for the quality of food you get. You get to choose what you want from a salad bar type arrangement and then it gets cooked. I've eaten at much better Mongolian BBQ places so this one seemed sub-par to me. If you want to try it, come for lunch and not dinner, since the price goes up for the dinner for essentially the same thing.
Green Bowl is a great place to eat out if you're looking to keep things healthy. You fill a bowl with as many veggies and noodles that you like (and they have pretty much anything you could want), choose your sauces, hand your bowl to the cook, and they stirfry it with your choice of meat. You also get your choice of brown or white rice with your meal.
One of the cool things I like about Green Bowl is that they have a chalkboard with recommendations of sauce combinations if you're not sure what to get. My favorite is a combo of black bean & hoisin. The great thing about it is that it's all-you-can-eat, so if you're not happy with your first sauce selection, you can keep going up to try more. I like trying a lot of different combos, so I get a small bowl each time.
One downside is that it's kind of small inside, so it can get crowded. Also, you can only get one type of meat with your veggies at a time - I've been to similar places where you can get more than one meat if you choose. Also, anytime I am in Green Bowl, my clothes always smell like stir-fry for the rest of the day (to the point where people know where I've been :) But, overall, highly recommended!
The Green Bowl is an inexpensive (ok, not if you're a college student) and fun lunch that's sure to please. It's all practically self-serve.
Grab a bowl, put some noodles into it (you have some choices here), add your fixings (baby corn, onions, mushrooms, you name it), and consult the blackboard to prepare a sauce of your liking. It takes mere moments, then hand off the bowl to a floor cook who will handle it and - if I remember correctly - will deliver your cooked masterpiece to your table. It's not authentic stir fry, as everything is cooked at once, vegetables and meats, resulting in some things being overcooked occasionally.
Speaking of sauces, I made the mistake of mixing way too many spicy sauces together so my first serving was fiery, to say the least. There are free refills, so get up and start the process all over again.
Eat, enjoy, repeat. Just make sure to lay off the pepper sauces!
