Sunday Long Read: Dinner, Theater

Eater's Jaya Saxena donned a chef's hat for a course on how to be a teppanyaki chef at Benihana, and in this week's Sunday Long Read she tells her story that it's not all fun and games.   

 

The seventh point on the waiver I had to sign was “Please do not throw or toss food into anyone’s mouth, plate, etc.” I felt cheated: This was the implicit promise of Benihana — Japanese Steakhouse and Place Where I Would Learn How to Flip a Shrimp Into My Friend’s Mouth. But I signed, and my apprenticeship began.

I can’t remember the first time I went to a teppanyaki steakhouse, but like many Americans, I have an obsession with this specific form of dinner theater: A chef expertly flips his spatulas (it’s always a man), tosses steak, and makes a flaming volcano out of stacked onion rounds before a willingly captive audience of diners seated around an impossibly hot slab of metal. When I was a child, it felt like the circus to me. In adulthood, with the addition of tiki drinks and sake bombs, it’s become a campy indulgence, its invitation always prefaced by an OMG wouldn’t it be fun? In that way, it’s also become a bellwether of camaraderie: If you think it wouldn’t be fun, or if you think you’re too good for the restaurant Tyrese has in his backyard, you’re not good enough for me.

I am fascinated with teppanyaki chefs in the same way I am with dancers and competitive eaters; using the body for both work and performance feels like the exact opposite of what I do as a writer, and while I am not going to drop my career and take up ballet, I long to know what it feels like to make movement and coordination the means by which you pay your bills. To go home at night having caught 50 shrimp tails in your hat, banged your spatula and fork in rhythm between each course, spun an egg around a hot griddle, and know it was a job well done.

Benihana lets you find out. For the low, low price of $300, you can sign up for its “Be the Chef” program, which provides an hour-long training session that prepares you to wow and amaze five guests, to whom you will then serve shrimp and steak and chicken fried rice with the background assistance of a professional. You should know that I have been asking my editors to do this for years, insisting that I could coax a good piece out of it. But really, I just wanted to know what it feels like to be behind the griddle.

I thought this would be fun, but as soon as I texted my friends the invitation, a gray dread settled over me. I would have an hour to learn not just how to make lunch for them, but also how to perform the making of it. It seems silly that it hadn’t occurred to me how much being watched might affect my experience, that shyness or embarrassment might be part of the package. I thought of my previous experiences at a Benihana table, watching the chef’s every precise movement, laughing and clapping at the conclusion of each successful trick, and having that loving but specific attention turned toward me. I’d asked for an opportunity to earn my friends’ praise. Now it was dawning on me that I might earn only their pity.

It's a tough job, folks. Being behind the grill all day is bad enough, but you have to put on a show as much as you have to put on the food.

Respect your local teppanyaki joint chef.