Benihana’s is somewhat of a cultural phenomenon, resoundingly successful and endlessly imitated. It shouldn’t need much introduction: it’s the restaurant where you pay $40 to sit at a big hot plate where a Mexican guy in a brightly colored hat cooks a teriyaki steak for you. Sometimes they fling food into your mouth, sometimes they don’t. They always do that onion volcano trick, though.
The one in Seattle is located by (under?) the IBM building by Rainier Square, facing 5th. It’s been there a long time, as the pictures of celebrities on the walls show. There are really faded pictures of a thin Steven Seagal, a not so old Pat Morita, and a amusingly heroic Shawn Kemp so you can tell it’s pretty old. There are some newer celebrities as well, but they’re mostly Seattle athletes so who cares about them, am I right?
Benihana’s isn’t all metal tables and garish frat parties. There’s a waiting area and a bar, too!
The bar area is large and it incorporates a small sushi counter. There were some happy hour sushi deals that seemed fairly decent, the rolls and cuts that passed by me from time to time definitely didn’t skimp on the portions. Ordering sushi at Benihana’s is like ordering a salad at McDonald’s, but I was quickly growing delirious with hunger, so I got an appetizer california roll and some sushi. Not terrible, not great, it’s a california roll. What do you expect?
I didn’t really understand how their sake list was organized, so I ended up ordering one of the more expensive brands of sake. Everyone else at the table had water, which was probably the wiser decision. The sake I got wasn’t bad at all, but I could’ve gotten otokoyama for about half the price so I really screwed the pooch on that one.
It’s not surprising that the wait was taking forever. They make you wait for your entire party to arrive, even if they have to split you up anyways. So that guy who is fashionably late partially because he can’t find his way into Seattle from wherever the fuck he’s coming from? Don’t invite him. Because he’s not going to eat anything anyways. Eventually he showed up and we got to sit. They were very diplomatic about forcing us to sit at separate tables, and by diplomatic I mean courteous with terrible results.
The menu consists your meat orders, your seafood orders and your meat/seafood orders. The meat/seafood section consists of a dozen synonyms for “surf and turf.” I ordered the “splash n’ meadow” (I think that’s what it’s called). I think there was also something that was like the “boat and sea” or something, who knows. Basically you pick two meats and hope they don’t add up to more than $50. You can get stuff like yakisoba and scallops and some other stuff, but paying 20 dollars for something that obviously tastes like it costs 4 dollars is a bit too ridiculous for even this blog.
Most of the people ordered your normal teppanyaki grilling platters, except for one of us who ordered some sushi. Unfortunately, the sushi never came. Maybe the waitress forgot to place the order, maybe she wasn’t able to hear her order the food (it’s really loud inside Benihana’s hard to hear anything really, especially with drunken frat fucks one table over cheering every time they can remember their names), but the end result is someone didn’t get dinner that night.
Our chef’s name was Miguel, and he brought out his cart of sauces and instruments and proceed to do his thing. He did the flaming onion volcano, and he cooked our meats. There really wasn’t much showmanship to his flair, just kind of going through the motions of flipping his knives around and tossing bits of stuff into his hat.
The fascinating thing about Benihana’s success is that the process is so transparent that someone should’ve caught on by now. I mean, you can see how terrible your cut of meat is, how small your shrimp look before they cook it, the very base ingredients that go into your sauces, the wilted lettuce, the limp carrots, etc. Instead of hiding it in some “mystery meats” “house salad” “secret sauce,” Benihana’s is simply stating, “these are the shitty ingredients that go into what you are paying too much to eat.” But people still go. It still gets packed. The food is safe and the chef’s antics are amusing.
My food definitely did not taste like it should have cost 25 dollars. The prawns were small, grocery store style shrimp, like they were hot pot ingredients rather than main course material. The steak was not a generous cut at all and did not seem particularly juicy or tantalizing.
So in the end Benihana’s felt like an overpriced exercise in this dated food-entertainment hybrid experience. I don’t think anyone at the table was really happy with their meal and it’d be hard to get me to go there even for a birthday or as a favor (maybe if I wasn’t paying). Maybe if I had been eating with Pat Morita I would’ve had a better time.
