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The ladies were puzzled. Cheryl Spangler, Valeria Borunda Jameson and Susan Puckett, three university-admissions workers on a training wisit to Florence, Kentucky, had walked into a local barbecue joint called Chung Kiwha. But instead of sauce-covered mutton served up from the kitchen, they saw a buffet of uncooked meats and vegetables. Instead of knives and forks, they were given large scissors, chopsticks and metal tongs. No candle flickered at their table, but a bucket of fiery wood charcoal hissed in the tabletop grill pit. Chung Kiwha served barbecue, all right—cook-it-your-self Korean barbecue. “I didn’t realize there were restaurants like this,” marveled Spangler to her friends, who hail from Knoxville, Tennessee, and I worked in restaurants for 20 years.

The secret is out, thanks to the growing popularity of restaurants where the customer is the chef. Long a staple of immigrant communities in big cities, restaurants where diners chop, grill, boil, or dip their di their food are hot in the American heartland. St.Paul, Minnesota, has Thai hot-pot cooking. Indianapolis, Indiana, has Japanese shabu-shabu (another type of hot pot). A pizzeria in Las Vegas lets customers roll the dough.

Why would people bother going out to cook their own meal? “Americans want control,” says Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of research for the National Restaurant Association. “The cook-it-your-self experience embodies the American values of freedom of choice and independence.” With families spending 46% of their food budget on meals outside the home, they miss the cooking experience—sort of. “Psychologically, people want to be a little involved,” says Pamela Parseghian, executive food editor at Nation’s Restaurant News.

Not every diner, however, embraces the experience. Dragged in by enthusiastic wives, “men often sit with their arms crossed…that is, until we fill them up with good wine,” says Will Layfield, owner of the Melting Pot in Westwood, New Jersey. At the Vinoklet, diner Grey Schafer says, “I don’t cook at home, and if I’m going to pay good money, I want someone to do the cooking for me.” What’s more, do-it-your-self dining isn’t cheap. At the minturn country Club in Minturn, Colorado, Kobe beef costs $49.95—uncooked. Still, restaurant-owners insist that the customer knows best. “Who knows what to them is rare?” says Mikulic, owner of Vinoklet. “This way, if they screw it up, I get no complaints.” Back at Chung Kiwha in Florence, diner Puckett sees it this way: “We don’t have to clean up, do we?.”