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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.
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