When done well, it can be pretty entertaining, but as I've said before, this blog is about the food.
The real problem with reviewing a restaurant that does this style of cooking is that you really are beholden to the quality of each individual chef. As this is working with a very hot flat top, you really need someone on the ball to really do it correctly. Quality of ingredients can be lost pretty easily depending on how the flattop is handled. Add in all the little tricks and such, you get a pretty difficult task to accomplish correctly. As a result, my review can't, in all honesty, be a full review of the restaurant. Some chefs are probably just better than others. If my chef isn't good, that might mean he had an off night, or I just got a newer guy. There's no pass or line for an executive or sous chef to do a quality spot check. It's just really variable.
My group of 7 went on a Sunday night where we were seated at one of the large tables surrounding one of the teppanyaki flat tops. I decided to go with the NY Strip Steak for $16, while my girlfriend went for the Salmon for $16 as well. You may recall my review of Mahzu Sushi and Grill. The Salmon being almost the exact same price allowed for a pretty good shot to get a side by side comparison. The steak was something I'd have to gauge on my own.
Each teppanyaki meal began with a soup and salad.
The soup was not a miso soup, but a brothy kind of mushroom soup with tempura flakes. It was alright. The flavor was mild and the texture of the tempura flakes and mushrooms mixed in gave it a little something extra. The salad was made with a lighter ginger vinaigrette rather than the more thick ginger dressings you normally see. It was also alright. They were more just there than to actually serve the meal to come in any really positive way.
When the chef brought his cart out, he went around asking the doneness we'd prefer for our meat. I said rare because I figured that's the only way to really ensure any kind of rareness considering how thinly sliced the 2 3 oz NY Strips were that I had ordered. He did not ask my girlfriend to what doneness she would have liked her salmon. This came back a bit later.
The first thing the chef started with was the rice. He made a fried rice by crisping up some rice on the flat top. He then laid out some eggs which he proceeded to cook into oblivion. He really cooked these. I'd say overcooked them as they were basically harden crumbs of eggs by the end. Considering this, I'm probably a terrible teppanyaki customer, as I'll see stuff overcooking while it's happening and become apprehensive when the chef doesn't get on top of that. He then proceeded to mix the egg pellets and the rice together seasoning it with some sauce and some dried seasoning blend. As he put the rice on my plate, my first thought: Bland. The rice just wasn't very seasoned. For a fried rice, that's not so good. Two sauces came with the rice though.
The first was the normal spicy mayo with vinegar and sugar mixture you see commonly at Japanese steak houses, sometimes referred to as "shrimp sauce." The other sauce was a kind of a sweetish soy vinegar sauce. In order to get flavor on this rice, we had to drop a goodly amount of each sauce onto the rice. Of course, the rice is probably at its best when it just came out from being cooked, but we have run into the first problem of this kind of teppanyaki. Yamato doesn't cook everything at the same time. It does rice first, then protein, then vegetables, and finally noodles. There's a several minute gap between all of these regardless of chef proficiencies. If someone ordered chicken, it's going to take 4 minutes or so. There's a pretty good reason rice dishes usually are not appetizers outside of the rare risotto. Rice is largely meant to be a filler. When done well, it's meant to accent other flavors with whatever seasoning its been hit with. This is how nigiri succeeds. Fried rice, on the other hand, is supposed to be made using leftovers similar to how Americans will make a sandwich using leftover meat from a roasted Turkey. Having this to start out the meal feels weird, but it's made worse because if you don't eat it while it's hot, you get tepid rice, which now tastes only of the sauce you dumped on it to give it some flavor in the first place.
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| Forced Perspective or not, that's a ton of rice. |
The proteins can be broken down pretty easily. The steak was cooked rare, which as I established in my previous reviews, is really important for any place to do if they ask how well cooked you want something. It was lightly seasoned, but that's OK as a cut of beef like a NY Strip can work pretty well without that much seasoning. It was pretty juicy as a result of it being cooked rare. I have no idea why my friends got theirs cooked beyond medium rare as that flat top is killing flavor every second it cooks beyond the medium rare point. In terms of quantity I'd say I got somewhere between 6-8 oz of steak. I'd err on the side of 6 oz. The beef looked pretty decent. I'd say of pretty solid quality.
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| Even with the salmon getting the benefit of forced perspective, it's still a ton of rice. |
My girlfriend's Salmon was just over cooked. She got 3 cuts, all cut in different portions, so, naturally, they all cooked unevenly. Each piece didn't have skin, but they were all cooked as though they did by cooking largely on one side. One of our friends was asked how rare he wanted his tuna cooked, but the chef didn't ask my girlfriend the same question. He ended up cooking each piece well done. What flavor the fish might have had was largely killed leaving it merely the taste that salmon was used, but of what quality? No one can say. The seasoning was light again, and that may have been OK with a lighter cooked fish, but as it stood there just wasn't much flavor there. That's what happens when you cook salmon too far though.
The mixed vegetables were of an OK quality. I think they probably could have used our old friend the maillard reaction to give them some color instead of largely just getting the color from the sauce the chef hit the veg with as it cooked. Seemed like fresh veggies though.
The noodles were of a pretty good quality. I don't know which brand they used, but they did taste how good noodles should taste. Regretfully, the noodles weren't seasoned particularly much, so this was kind of an opportunity left to die. Side sauces come back into play here.
You know, that may be my biggest issue with this meal. When you flavor pretty much your entire meal with the same seasoning, no wonder it's kind of a dull experience. Instead of really trying to make each component of the dish beyond the protein just act as filler with the same seasoning, they could have embraced making the rice, noodles, and veg all part of a larger experience. This runs into my main problem though where you are basically eating stuff in order as its served if you want the food to be hot. So you have rice, your protein, veggies, and finally noodles. I attempted to see how it all worked together, so I tried each part hot as it came out, and waited for the chef to complete the full thing before digging in. The end result left me, at the end of the meal, wanting for a flavor, literally any different flavor, to just come through.
At 16 dollars an entree, I think the value is sort of there, considering you do get a lot of food of an alright quality depending on the chef and what you ordered. Personally, I'd suggest they switch up the portions though. For the so called main part of the dish (the beef, chicken, seafood, etc.) the portion feels woefully inadequate compared to all the filler. I'd rather they cut back on the filler and upped the protein in whatever way maintains the same price or cut out some of the filler and drop the price a bit. With so much carb filler on the plate, it's like they haven't even heard of the new food plate thingy.
So if you're desirous of teppanyaki, I have a hard time giving a firm warning to stay away. This last experience was just mediocre. It was basically the Fridays or Chilis of Japanese food as so many Teppanyaki places seem to be in the US. If you go on your birthday, it's basically a buy one, get one, which I think may be single handedly pushing their business along by the birthday person bringing all their friends along. All the same, you go with a friend and get 2 17 dollar entrees it'll only be 17 dollars and if you split the check with whomever you brought along, 10 dollars a person (including tip) is pretty solid even on a mediocre night.
--Charles
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