Yaki on the Teppan

Growing up* in Taiwan, it has never occurred to me that Teppanyaki was anything more than common. You walk on the streets and you will see 2 restaurants that offer teppanyaki for $100NT/person ($3CDN!). Sure you have the fancy ones too that cost $1500-$10000NT/person ($50-$200CDN/person) that changes plates for you and give you wet towels every time something is cooked (which, surprisingly, I've gone to at least 5-6 of them if my memory serves me correctly), but really the culture isn't that novel for me and I have never thought about how "cool" it really can be for someone who has never tried it.

A few weeks ago, Adam went to a restaurant called Benihana and told me that he has to take me there. I never asked him what it was, assuming that it was just another Japanese restaurant, until the day before we went when he told me it was teppanyaki. At that point, i felt i experienced a sudden paradigm shift when i realized what i believed was a part of everyday life can be something new for people. But even with this initial realization, I thought it was still pretty funny when Adam's roommate sat down at the grill and looked confused about what was going on.



For those of you who don't know what it is, Teppanyaki, according to wiki, "is a type of Japanese cuisine that uses an iron griddle to cook food. Although it is viewed in the western world as Japanese cuisine, it is not popular in Japan and many people of Japanese origin regard it as western food; some Japanese citizens might even feel offended to hear that it is Japanese food." Teppan literally means "iron plate" in Japanese and Chinese and yaki means "cook" in Japanese. Teppanyaki is ultra popular in taiwan and most people i know, including my dad, absolutely loves it. Usually, even in the less fancy restaurants, the chef will perform certain tricks and do awesome things with the cutlery used to make the food and light things on fire (if you ever get a philly cheese steak sandwich in the foodcourt, sometimes you might get lucky and see the chefs perform similar cutlery skills on the iron grill). Coincidentally, the chef that did our cooking turned out to be Taiwanese and used to live a few streets down from where I used to live in Taiwan.

For those of you who are interested in trying out Teppanyaki, there are a good number of them in Toronto actually. Akasaka has some pretty neat chefs with three big grills and apparently this fancy Benihana at which we ate can also be found in Fairmont Royal York.

*I use the phrase "growing up" quite loosely, evidently since I totally emigrated when I was 7. But there has not been a single time when I went back to Taiwan that I did not have Teppanyaki at least two times.