One style of cooking that always puts me into amusement is Teppanyaki.
My first Teppanyaki experience was at Tanaka of Tokyo restaurant in Oahu, Hawaii. We just randomly picked this restaurant and at that time we were totally ignorant about teppanyaki. At first, I thought teppanyaki was some kind of Japanese name for some dish :P. Anyway my hunger didn’t allow me to do any research about this and all I wanted was to eat something real heavy. As soon as I entered the restaurant, I felt something different. We sat along with other people in front of an iron plate. I looked at my hubby with a curious face and asked him: why are we sitting in front of an iron plate. At the same time I was eager to find out what was this all about. Then the waiter came and introduced us about teppanyaki and it’s origin. Teppanyaki is a style of Japanese cuisine that uses an iron griddle to cook food. The word “teppanyaki” is derived from teppan, which means iron plate, and yaki, which means grilled, broiled or pan-fried.
It didn’t take me so long to figure out that it was not just ordinary cooking. Highly talented chefs performed a real show, which included juggling utensils/knifes, flip a shrimp into his/her shirt pocket, catch an egg in his/her hat, toss an egg up in the air and split it with a knife, flip flattened shrimp pieces into the diners’ mouths, or arrange onion rings into fire-shooting volcanoes.
Only thing that disappointed me that day was that, after all day site seeing in Oahu, my camera ran out out of charge and I couldn’t capture all that cooking fun.
At the end, I realized if we hadn’t gone to that restaurant we would have missed some real fun, this definitely added an extra fun to our Hawaiian tour of 2007.
After coming back from Hawaii, I did some googling about teppanyaki restaurants and to my surprise I found out that the famous teppanyaki restaurant is just minutes away from my house. I couldn’t be happier, once again we headed to the teppanyaki restaurant. This time I made sure that my camera was in full charge 🙂 Here is the video I captured from Benihana. This would clearly explain everything you want to know about teppanyaki and the performances done by the chef. Enjoy.
