True Mongolian food is mainly meat, milik and flour. These ingredients are most accessible to the nomadic tribes of Mongolia.
Our dinner at Shilingol, a small restaurant in Sengoku, was mainly lamb and milk products. We started with a salty milk tea and fried bread, then dug into the only vegetable for the meal–shredded potatoes with garlic. Mainly we ate meat: spicy lamb shish kebab; steamed buns filled with seasoned mutton; lamb on the bone; lamb and seasonings wrapped in flatbread; slices of salty dried lamb.
At 8:00 one of the cooks came out and played traditional Mongolian tunes on a long-necked, square bodied string instrument called a morin khuur. The music was multiharmonic and dissonent but quite beautiful and complex.
We rounded out our dinner with deep fried dough served with a milk glaze for dipping–Mongolian doughnuts.
