My visit to Benihana was also my first visit to a teppanyaki restaurant and I can in all honesty…read moresay that it was one of my most memorable visits to a restaurant ever - I can't remember if I've ever enjoyed myself, or a visit itself, this much before when visiting a restaurant.
For starters - make sure that you book seats before you come here. Coming to Benihana and eating in the "restaurant" part makes no sense what so ever. The restaurant has five teppanyaki tables, each hosts 7 guests and trust me, this is where you want to be seated.
We were lucky enough to book the two last seats at our desired hour and came to the restaurant 20 minutes earlier. At first, we were welcomed by a nice girl that asked us if we had a reservation and then she took our jackets. We were invited to wait for our reservation either at the bar or in their lounge area - we decided to wait at the bar but in retrospect, it might be nicer to wait in the lounge area (the couches are super comfy)
We ordered two glasses of 17% aged choya - one was slightly sweeter and had a yellowish color, while the other one was dryer in taste and had more of a reddish color (this is the one I had and I can definitely recommend it).
Slightly after 2pm, we were invited over to our teppanyaki table and that's when the magic begun.
Like I'd already mentioned - this was my first visit to a teppanyaki restaurant so I didn't really know what to expect. My company however had already been to one before so he told me that teppanyaki chefs are supposed to do tricks and stuff but he also admitted that he'd never been to one where the chef interacted so much with the guests, made jokes and so on.
So that was definitely one of the highlights - the chef. Our chef was Asian and spoke only English but like mentioned above, he interacted with us pretty much during the entire dinner and was a sheer delight, overall. It really was so much fun and I was smiling for pretty much the entire time.
The menu offers a broad selection of appetizers, teppanyaki meals and sushi as well as a couple of meals for children with cute little names like "Pokemon"-something and "Pikachu"-something. If you have kids, bring them along. The chefs interact with the children as well and they will be in for a blast when seated at a teppanyaki table. If not, then there's a children's play corner at the restaurant as well.
If you're interested in choosing something from the teppanyaki menu, don't order anything else. The teppanyaki meal includes a soup of your choosing (you can choose between miso and onion soup - we had both and I can definitely recomment the onion soup as it is a lot more flavorful than the miso), a fresh salad, a starter consisting of shrimps and fried veggies, rice (either boiled or fried - go for the fried! will return to this point in a sec) as well as your teppanyaki.
Trust me - this is enough food for one person, even if you're hungry.
We made the "mistake" of ordering starters too - tofu and kimchi. Both are good but it makes for too much food in general so if you're having the teppanyaki meal, stick to just that.
We decided upon lamb and New York sirloin steak - both are excellent choices that come with mushrooms (you can opt out of the mushrooms though) but there are also options with seafood, fish, chicken and shrimp or just chicken. For instance.
The fried rice is EXCELLENT, especially with a fried egg. It was delicious and was prepared together with the rest of the meal by the chef.
At the end we also ordered one creme brulee (flavored with green tea). It was delicious.
In general we had an amazing afternoon and we will definitely be coming back. The service is very good, polite, discreet and helpful and our teppanyaki chef was down-right awesome.
They don't take AmEx though but plan to offer that to guests in the future.
