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The hot spot at Fire+Ice. Cheerful chefs prepare what you present to them. Photograph by David Carmack

If you don't like your food at Fire+Ice, you have only yourself to blame. An "improvisational grill" near Harvard Square, the newcomer works like this. You descend from street level by a wide ramp to a colorful, funky, basement space that accommodates 200 (and 50 more in season in an outdoor courtyard). You pass the bar and are taken in hand by host or hostess, who leads you to your unclothed table. You are glad it is not in the grill room because the music there (African, Spanish, Celtic, Caribbean) is too loud for your taste, you being of a certain age.

You turn to your menu. "We provide the ingredients, you create a feast," it says. The menu describes 10 sauces, seven of which will be available on any day: garlic-ginger, teriyaki, Malaysian red curry, Thai green curry, sweet and sour, Jamaican jerk BBQ (which has four little flame symbols beside it), Indian vindaloo curry, roasted red pepper, Dijon-scallion, and house fajita sauce. Your waitress explains the various challenges and opportunities confronting you, takes your drink order, points to the salad bar, and departs to get rice and tortillas, sometimes beans.

You go to the room with the grill and ingredients and --with only your own counsel--assemble dinner. You have a palette-like tray that holds two bowls. Into the bigger bowl you put raw shrimp, calamari, bay scallops, parsley, scallions, shallots, snow peas, and two kinds of mushroom. Not too much because you want to go round again after the seafood. Into the little bowl you put garlic-ginger sauce.

The circular grill is eight feet in diameter, probably the largest such grill on earth. On a busy night five chefs, even six, work at its perimeter, wearing piratical bandannas and white jackets. One area of the grill is vegetarian only (and all the sauces are wholly vegetarian). You go to a countertop railing encircling the grill and put down your tray. Your chef decants your big bowl onto the grill, perhaps advising you that a splash of Jamaican jerk would enliven the fajita sauce you propose she anoint your beef, or lamb, or pork tenderloin with (in the event, you add too much jerk, and smoke comes out of your ears). She sets about with spatulas. Three to five minutes later, you're back at your table, fork uplifted.

The ingredients are perfectly fresh and of top quality. The sauces are well crafted (perhaps the teriyaki is too salty). The chefs do their part fine and can give you a faultless batch of free-range chicken thighs without assassinating your sprouts. But if you have put one of every ingredient in your bowl, or mixed a confusion of sauces, you won't be pleased. You don't have to finish your concoction; just practice wise restraint the next time at the trough.

Unlimited trips cost a mere $13.75, less at lunch. With, say, a margarita (the "ice" part of the equation), wine, and a slice of delectable Key lime pie, your bill doubles.

The restaurant concept comes from Mongolia, explains general manager Peter Johnson. The first such place to appear in the West was in London, the next in Dublin. They are popular now in California and the Midwest, where they are often called Mongolian barbecues. But, says Johnson, their quality of food is typically far inferior to what's on offer at Fire+Ice.

On a recent Tuesday night the place teemed. Johnson says that on weekends people with bowls can stack up a bit around the grill. "You get to see what's going on and to meet others," he says. "That adds to the ambiance of what we like to call 'interactive dining.'"

~ C.R.