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It's all about a good 'show' at Japanese steakhouse

Grace Beahm
The Post and Courier

Yamato

Yamato claims to be the "original Japanese steakhouse of South Carolina." The first location was and is in Columbia. In 1986, then-manager Sookie Harris purchased the business and opened a second location in Myrtle Beach (1995). A third location followed in Mount Pleasant in 2001.

The Japanese steakhouse genre is a style of restaurant popularized in the 1960s by Hiroaki (Rocky) Aoki. He called his restaurants Benihana after the red safflower. They featured the teppan yaki method of cooking, "pyrotechniques" and the knife skills of a Ginsu salesman. You went there as much for the show as for the food.

One hundred million meals later, Benihana can be found worldwide from Russia to Chile.Yamato is a restaurant modeled after this concept.

It is a large restaurant with a bar, sushi area and three separate dining rooms, each with its own series of teppan (steel grills) for the yaki (broiling/grilling) method of cooking. The exhaust hoods are stainless monoliths to the smoke, fumes and flames that take place as your dinner is prepared. This is a communal experience as you gather around the U-shaped counter that surrounds the cooking surface.

Complete dinners include clear soup, salad, shrimp appetizer, vegetables, protein entree, fried rice and sherbet.

A variety of sauces is provided for both your salad and meats. The ginger sauce is suggested for seafood and vegetables, a "creamy" sauce is mayonnaise-based and one that many diners enjoyed spreading on their rice, and a soy sauce dressing is served as a spicy vinaigrette. The latter did pack some chili flavor but tasted more of an Italian vinaigrette with soy sauce added.

To compare the prices of Yamato with any of the steakhouse restaurants in town makes it a great value for a steakhouse experience.

The children's menu, available for ages 10 and under and priced from $7 to $11, is overpriced, and you would do better to select the $3 "child share charge," especially for younger bellies and appetites.

The show begins with a server taking your drink and dinner order. Soups and salads are served post haste. Your food is not only prepared in community fashion, but you also better be prepared to eat with flow.

The broth, traditionally a clear miso soup, is garnished with button mushroom slices and rings of scallions. Nothing special. The salad is crisp, cold and nicely portioned. The dressings, though "homemade," taste bottled and bland save for a bit of heat in the vinaigrette.

A chef soon appears with his cart of tools, props and ingredients. Oil from a squirt bottle creates a happy face on the grill; eggs are quickly scrambled for the fried rice.

Condiments are juggled. Salt flips, pepper twists. The spatula wages war with the knife. He chops, he dices, he slices, he spears, he cooks, he mounds, he spreads; the sweat beads on his forehead. Shrimp is tossed to the crowd. We are at Sea World. It's feeding time for the sea lions. Mouths open, the chef aims, and he misses. The "pups" try again. He scores! Meanwhile, the appetizer shrimp are overcooking on the grill.

A Mount Fuji of rice is being seasoned, tossed and bound together with the scrambled egg, finished with butter (surprise) and topped with peas and carrots and quickly served to the guests.

Our knife-wielding samurai tackles our proteins and vegetables, karate-chopping the beef into strips, then bite-size bits. Chicken is quickly deconstructed into filaments so that it will cook along with the beef, and shrimp and scallops are tossed in tandem.

Squirt bottles add sounds of sizzle, oil is flamed, knives rattle spatulas — all the while our chef is minding the zucchini, mushrooms, carrots, onions and broccoli that are our vegetables.

A squeeze of lemon, a shake of sesame seeds and before you could say Morimoto, dinner is served.

Now about the food: The portions and the value for this experience are good. The beef was tender, the shrimp (we were told) local, and the chicken slightly overcooked. The vegetables maintained their crispness, and the squirt of lemon brightened their flavors. But what happens as you make your way through the plate is the sameness of "teriyaki" prevails and everything begins to taste the same.

But this is not a restaurant that you select for the food. You come here for the "eatertainment." It is all about the show, and on that score, our chef needed more time to work on his game. A samurai of the grill, he was not.

His performance was robotic; he did little to engage three youngsters who were enthralled with the knives, the smoke and the flames. He left out many of the "scenes" that usually accompany hibachi parlor cooking. Where was our onion volcano? What happened to our fire balls? We had the "not-ready-for-prime-time" chef, and with the chef as the show, we felt cheated, wanting to go to the table behind us where the chef had them laughing, cheering, high-fiving, banging the gong, singing Happy Birthday and making direct hits with his shrimp.

We wanted our Iron Chef of steel. Once dinner was served, he packed up his cart and left the "stage."

Dessert is a tangerine and lime sherbet combo, and we think Yamato can do better on this front. With mochi available at our local grocery store and green tea ice cream in the freezer case, we think more authentic flavors can prevail at South Carolina's "original" Japanese steakhouse.

All of the above being said, with the tsunami of sushi places and absence of tatami dining, Yamato is a place for fun, family and value, and when you leave its kitchen stadium, gochisosama will be on your lips (thank you).

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