The Knife of the Party

Soon after a young Japanese immigrant named Rocky Aioki opened his first teppan-yaki steakhouse, Benihana of Tokyo, in New York City in 1964, he dubbed the then-novel concept "dinner theater." And it was a show: Customers were seated around a shiny, white-hot grill, where they watched a specially trained chef cut and chop vegetables and meat, flip eggs and cooked shrimp, and juggle salt and pepper shakers like a circus performer.

The Benihana chain hasn't made any inroads into Kansas City, but plenty of privately owned teppan-yaki (sometimes called hibachi) steak joints are doing good business here -- the concept has experienced a mini-boom in the past few years. But if the settings -- especially the Johnson County locations -- have grown more glamorous, the performance behind every stainless-steel grill is pretty much the same: The chefs go through identical moves and utter tired jokes according to script -- an egg spins and cracks on the grill and the chef blurts out, "Bad chicken!" And most customers still laugh on cue as if it were a requirement, like paying the bill.

The novelty of the two-month-old Suki Restaurant and Lounge is not in its chefs' well-rehearsed routines but in the fact that an expensively mounted restaurant that's half Japanese steakhouse and half traditional Chinese restaurant would have opened in a south Kansas City neighborhood restaurants have neglected for years. A restaurant with Suki's glam factor hasn't opened along this stretch (dominated by a KFC and a Dairy Queen on the other side of Wornall) for a long, long time.

Just around the corner from where the long-gone Cafe Nile specialized in rich Mediterranean dishes for many years, Suki is tucked between a pet clinic and a tax service in the Santa Fe Center. The shopping strip, which faces 85th Street, looks like most Kennedy-era architectural creations -- made of brick and plateglass windows and wrapped around a big parking lot. The space Suki now occupies was, says owner David Su, "a Mexican bar kind of place."

There's still a bar in the center, dividing the purple-walled steakhouse room from the mauve-and-gray Chinese restaurant (at some point, Su hopes to add sushi to the operation). Suki's Chinese half brings out all the standard Chinese-American dishes: orange beef and lemon chicken, moo-shu pork and shrimp lo mein, Happy Family Reunion and Triple Delight. It all comes out of the kitchen hot and fresh-tasting but not too spicy; even the peppery Szechwan beef is a little bland. The portions are beyond generous, but the Chinese dining room seems somber and even a shade depressing -- things are louder and livelier over in the steakhouse dining room.

With six teppan-yaki grills, the show room is far more alluring -- even during the lunch hour, when such featured chefs as Martin Tonster perform only an abbreviated version of the teppan-yaki show ("Come back at night," Martin advised. "The show much better.")

I thought it was only fair to bring my two goddaughters, ages 11 and 9, to Suki, since I flatly refuse to succumb to their choice of dinner theater: Chuck E. Cheese's, where the noise of kids, the animatronic floorshow and the arcade games gives me an immediate migraine. I knew the food at the Japanese steakhouse might throw the children for a loop (one of the girls refuses to touch vegetables, let alone eat them), but at least the chef's hijinks would be amusing.

I was right about that part. But they also found the communal experience of the meal to be totally alien. When we arrived, all but a few chairs around one of the blond wood counters were occupied. Everyone was laughing, smoking, drinking and conversing as if we had stumbled upon a private party.

"Do these people all know each other?" asked the 9-year-old.

As it happened, no. But this kind of dining, where the chef cooks everyone's meal at about the same time, encourages a convivial atmosphere. Like passengers on a cruise ship, we soon found ourselves chatting with total strangers. I spent much of the meal trying to figure out who was with whom (and why) -- that is, when I wasn't cajoling the kids to take at least an exploratory sip from the plastic bowl of pale yellow Japanese onion soup (named for the bits of scallion floating on the surface; the soup actually tasted like bland chicken bouillon). Or taste a salad drenched in a red ginger dressing that the 11-year-old accurately pointed out "was the exact same color as the blood in Nightmare on Elm Street."

The younger girl, a more adventurous eater than her sister, did taste the salad and announced: "Man, that stuff is strong." I liked the gingery dressing, but judging by the other uneaten salads left sitting on the counter, I'd say the kid had the majority opinion.

Suki's teppan-yaki dinners include the watery soup, the bracing salad, steamed rice and a crisp medley of grilled mushrooms, zucchini and onion. Fried rice, prepared in front of our eyes with chopped carrot, peas and grilled egg ("Bad chicken!"), costs a buck more but is well worth it, if only for the flashy preparation.