There’s a fairly large chance that you’ve been to a Japanese Steakhouse before. You know the kind, where you sit down at a huge flat grill, the chef comes out and whips knives and spatulas around his fingers, throws food here and there, and you’ve got yourself a meal.
When it comes to the part with tricks using fire, I’ve often thought: “I could do that myself!”
And I’d be wrong.
Last night I had a chance to eat at a Japanese Steakhouse where the chef was brand spanking new, and it was his first day on the job. I figured I’d use his experience as the best-possible-scenario for what would happen if I disregarded the disclaimer from the experts and tried this at home myself.
Wheeling out the cart was the first sign something was amuck; because rather than smoothly docking it into position, this cart gave him as much trouble as a shopping cart with a wobbly wheel gives me.
His execution of the spinning spatula was acceptable, but nothing impressive. No speed. No flare. The knife he just waved around, it was clear he didn’t want to let go of it.
With smiles, he dumped a blob of rice at the top of the grill and went to do the “egg roll” trick, where one spins an egg real fast and picks it up on the blade of the spatula. First attempt and the egg was running all over the hot grill. Second attempt it leap of the spatula and into the rice. He was expecting it to go into his hat.
Things calmed down at that with the eggs. He tossed them, not as high, but they missed or bounced off the edge, and soon he was out of eggs.
Then he decided to do some fire. Normally you draw a smiley face with one bottle, squirt a bit from another, light it from afar, and the blaze lasts an instant.
I said normally.
No, this guy lit the stuff in the middle of the grill with a match. A match. And that made a fireball. Which, still with the container in his left hand, he proceeded to squirt more fuel into. It was lighting gasoline.
I know from back where I was sitting, the heat was over powering. His exposed hand was in the middle of it for a moment. He cooled it off with a moist towel.
Chopping up stuff, he did pretty well. The objects weren’t moving, and he further used the spatula as a guide to keep the knife straight. But simply slicing food – slowly – wasn’t entertaining us.
To recapture our attention, he build a volcano out of onion slices. Again, how this works is that you put a little of bottle A and a little of bottle B, and you get a flame near it. It produces a small flame, to which you sprinkle spices in, and it looks like sparks. Why they call out “Chinese Fireworks” in a Japanese Steakhouse, I’ll never know. But then the flame goes out, and with a small push, the trapped steam makes a tube of “smoke”, as the chef pushes it forward slowly while rapping the spatula like a train bell.
Again, normally this is what’s supposed to happen.
He pours in a lot of bottle A and a lot of bottle B, and strikes his match, holding it directly over the spout.
This reminds me of the old fashioned commercial from the gas company which showed a gas filled room with people sitting in it smoking and talking. The point was, gas is safe. In order for it to become explosive, the gas to air mixture has to be right. Too little, and nothing happens. Too much, and like the commercial, nothing happens.
Well, there was so much stuff the chef put in, that it extinguished the flame. And that sent him off looking for more matches.
In the short time he was doing that, the liquid in the volcano was boiling away. So when he struck the second match next to the volcano, there was an enormous hovering gas cloud that suddenly became visible as it burst into flame. It was like someone cast magic missile on the darkness.
The tiny volcano literally roared as a jet like flame came spewing from it, and it was at this moment I could see the worry in his eyes. It was so hot that his recoil sent his spatula flying, and when he picked it up and set it at the other side of the table, he slathered the handle in butter. Which he noticed the next time he went to move it.
When the flame finally went out, billows of steam poured forth. It too had a low rustling whistle, something else I didn’t think was possible.
After wiping off his spatula, he refocused on just getting the food to us. And, yes, it was delicious. No complaints there.
We thanked him kindly, as he banged into his cart and tried to wheel it away with just as much trouble as his arrival.
It was at that point I thought the better to myself: this guy is a professional, he’s been trained, and this is his first day infront of customers. Imagine what would have happened if I tried this on my own, which we all know I’d do without supervision.
I don’t know which would be worse, discovering that we didn’t have a halon fire extinguisher at my instant disposal, or that the door to the ice trays and medicine cabinets are hard to open when you slice off all your fingers.
Either way, now we’ll never know. He put the fear of God into me about accepting my own limitations.