Eight steel-topped teppanyaki tables in the main dining room and two more in a side room offer plenty of opportunities for theatrical displays of knife and cleaver skills at Hikuni Japanese Seafood & Steakhouse in Santa Rosa.
On a recent Saturday night, the place was hopping, and three of the tables were presided over by dexterous chefs with their assortment of tricks for slicing, dicing, flipping and chopping food.
The tables are essentially steel griddles with burners underneath. They originated in 1945 in Japan as that occupied country became fascinated with Western style food. Intended as a way to introduce Japanese to grilled meats and seafood, they caught the fancy of many Westerners stationed there, as they were a bridge between hard-core Japanese fare like sashimi and Western cooking.
By the mid-1960s, chains of Japanese steakhouses had opened in the United States. Now Santa Rosa has its own Japanese steakhouse.
But Hikuni is a lot more than a Benihana-style teppanyaki -- or hibachi, as it's called here in the States -- grill. The restaurant is a sort of Japanese food bazaar, with hundreds of items. Some are prepared on the grill tables, but then there's nigiri sushi; maki (rolled) and temaki (hand-rolled) sushi; sashimi; combination plates; kitchen entrees like teriyaki, tempura, and katsu; noodle dishes like udon and soba; and sukiyaki (called the friendship dish because it's a family-style bowl of food from which everyone fishes his or her nibbles).
The spacious restaurant features a long sushi bar backed by an enormous blue tank of water in which pretty fish swim lazily, safe from the knives filleting their scaly cousins down on the counter. On a recent night, two sushi chefs chatted in Japanese and laughed amiably while preparing their little packets of pleasure.
Despite all the elbow room, the place has a closed-in feel to it, like a blackjack room in Vegas. And the faint, acrid smell of burnt cooking oil hangs in the air, most likely arising from the teppanyaki tables.
A pot of herbal tea, with the aroma of sweet dried hay, is set before you as soon as you sit down. If you order an entree, dinner will most likely start with a bowl of Miso Soup ($1.95 **?), the good, warm, salty soup of fermented soybean paste given a handful of little tofu squares and some pieces of seaweed. The soup was accompanied by a small salad of lettuce, tomato and slivers of cucumber in a sweet-and-sour dressing.
A Seaweed Salad ($4.95 ***) is a delicious mound of green threads -- gelatinous, chewy -- given a toasted sesame oil dressing and a sprinkling of sesame seeds. This dish might be the ultimate diet food, packed with minerals but short on calories. Pair it with two pieces of nigiri sushi, such as Unagi ($4.50 **?) for a light lunch or dinner. Unagi is freshwater eel, a tasty creature that lives part of its life in freshwater streams and part in the ocean. Large portions of eel are laid on top of slightly soggy sticky rice and wrapped in a cummerbund of black nori.
Tempura is a good gauge of the quality of a Japanese restaurant. Is the batter delicate or coarse, clean or oily? Are the vegetables inside the coating cooked through or are they hard to chew? In the case of Hikuni's Vegetable Tempura ($12.95 ***), almost all the quality points are touched. The batter is light and delicately crunchy and the vegetables are tender, but there is a noticeable amount of residual oil, an indication that the oil was not at the perfect temperature for deep frying. The plate included onion rings, broccoli florets, pieces of carrot and chunks of zucchini, sweet potato, eggplant and mushroom. It's accompanied by a bowl of dipping sauce.
Age-Dashi Tofu ($5.95 **?) is a bowl of fried cubes of soft tofu sprinkled with bonito flakes. Usually dashi is thought of as an infusion of bonito flakes in hot water, but there's no liquid in this dish. The liquid is in the form of a special sweet and salty brown dipping sauce that accompanies the tofu, and in more of the same dip that came with the tempura.
Hibachi Filet Mignon and Scallops ($25.95 *?) was a disappointment. The thin slice of steak was chewy -- no, let's call it like it is: tough -- hardly what you think of as filet mignon, and cooked well done. Six small scallops and two shrimp had been cooked in a slightly spicy brown sauce. This expensive but inferior plate included a large mound of unsalted white rice and a stir-fry of broccoli florets, onion, zucchini and bean sprouts.
The food improved when the Dallas Roll ($12.95 ***) arrived. It was the nightly special for maki sushi and contained spiced-up tuna, crab, avocado, onion and salmon along with a generous helping of tobiko on top. The tobiko, or flying fish roe, was an orange-red color, achieved at the processing plant where tobiko is dyed (in its natural state, it's pale yellow) and preserved with sorbic or benzoic acids, then frozen and shipped to restaurants in tubs. Although tobiko is therefore a processed food, it makes a pretty, crunchy addition to the Dallas Roll, which itself is very tasty.
If you're in a mood for raw fish, try the Tricolor Sashimi ($19.95 ***), four big pieces each of tuna, salmon and yellowtail served on a bed of shredded daikon radish and given the usual pickled ginger and wasabi to mix up with soy sauce for dipping. Each of these pieces of fish was a generous three bites. They looked and tasted fresh (anything less is unacceptable, of course).
The kids might love the Hikuni Split ($4.95 **?), fried bananas with ice cream. Or just wait for the half-peeled orange stuck with little American flags that comes free at the end of the meal.
To sum up: Hikuni has all the usual Japanese dishes, bento boxes, combination platters, seafood raw and cooked, and more, plus hibachi griddles and talented chefs who know how to slice and dice and make the kids (and adults) say, "Wow."
Jeff Cox writes a weekly restaurant review column for A&E. You can reach him at jeffcox@sonic.net.
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