The Problem With Performance Cuisine
If I were being a bit more honest with the title of this article, it might be called “My Problem With Performance Cuisine.” But the title probably lured you in, and you’re here now, so let’s discuss why I think that “performance cuisine” restaurants might actually be the worst possible dining experience.
First, there’s a problem of definitions we’re going to need to nail down. It’s difficult to give an exact name to this style of restaurant. I’m calling it “performance cuisine,” in which a chef prepares meals for diners in an entertaining manner, typically at the table.
You could probably guess that the primary culprit in this genre is the “classic” “Japanese” “hibachi” restaurant, exemplified by the rise of Benihana. You may notice my…generous use of quotation marks in that last sentence. Benihana and it’s numerous clones originated in the 1960s, were founded in America, and are not hibachi. The large steel heating plate used in “hibachi” restaurants is known in Japan as a teppan, and the food produced on them is called teppanyaki.
As a note: I’m choosing to exclude restaurants that don’t cook the food directly in front of you, even if there is some performative aspect. Medieval Times and its dinner theater cohorts get away…for now.
So here they are, my problems with performative cuisine in general and teppanyaki restaurants in particular:
The worst possible number of people to eat with is eight.
In every teppanyaki restaurant I’ve been to, diners are seated in a group of eight — four in front of the chef, two to the left, and two to the right. It doesn’t sound inherently flawed, but here’s my question. How many groups of diners are actually exactly eight people? I’d wager a guess of almost none.
If you go to a teppanyaki grill with some friends, you’ll probably have either three or four people in your party. That means you’ll be seated at the same table as at least one other group, likely also three or four strong. I can’t speak for everyone, but two groups of four people, total strangers to each other, sitting at the same table and eating food, sort pretending that half the people in this situation don’t exist sounds more like a punishment than a comfortable dining experience.
There’s something strangely artificial about it.
Again, I can’t speak with 100% certainty, but I highly doubt you’d ever find a Benihana or Benihana-esque restaurant in Japan. Central to the Japanese “vibe” (or at least my understanding of it) is a certain level of restraint that Benihana and its ilk seem to take pride in throwing out the window. How would a Japanese native feel about throwing eggs into hats and shrimp at paying customers?
Yes, teppanyaki is originally a Japanese invention shipped over to the US, but somewhere along the line it got tainted with a level of inauthenticity and showmanship that I’m not really comfortable with. It’s like going to the Mexican restaurant where they boil everything and give it to you in a cup. There’s some kind of cultural mismatch that you can’t get over once you see it.
There’s not really any novelty.
Perhaps there is a lack of novelty in the food, too, but the performative aspect specifically is just…kind of tiring to watch. When was the last time you saw a teppanyaki chef do a new trick? They’ve throw food around or at others, they play with the cooking utensils, they make the much-adored onion volcano, and what else? I’d love to see some innovation in the field, but no restaurant seems to be willing to do it.
Perhaps the additional training or skill required to do extra tricks would drive up the cost of meals or wages of chefs. Again, I’m not the expert here. But when you go to a restaurant to have a good time and eat food with friends, it really kills the mood to see your chef going through the motions, cracking the same barely acceptable jokes and doing the same trick for the twentieth time today.
Finally, it seems like teppanyaki restaurants are especially pervasive in my home state of South Carolina. This is more of a problem specific to me, so I won’t stick it on the main list, but from what I can tell, teppanyaki is a force to be reckoned with in the south.
“The Japanese steakhouse genre exists across the country, but it’s uniquely central to dining culture in the Carolinas. When the now-defunct Blue Kudzu Sake in Asheville was soliciting investors, its founders dutifully cited a statistic showing North Carolina has the nation’s lowest ratio of Japanese restaurants to residents. Presumably, they didn’t let on that the vast majority of those restaurants feature knife tricks and orange sherbet.”
Read the full article at the Post and Courier website here.
So that’s more or less my problem with “performance cuisine.” In the process of Americanizing the Japanese teppanyaki tradition, something was changed, or perhaps lost — in both the performative aspect and the cuisine aspect — and I’d argue we’re none the better for it.
title image: “Plum pudding - flambe” by Brian Uhreen is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
