Kanpai Japanese
We recently decided to try the new Japanese steakhouse west of Short Pump Mall, along Broad Street, adjacent to the new Ethan Allen furniture store.
They offer a more traditional dining area “for sushi” orders, and the larger part of their dining room is available for Teppan table dining. The fold-out fan style menus feature different proteins that can be ordered (steak, chicken, combinations of meat and seafood) that determine your dinner price. The cook comes out, fires-up the hot grill, and does a little fancy noisemaking and saucing to prepare the meal. You get fried rice, the protein, and some vegetables. It was all very typical, I have to say, nothing different from the other places in town that have been doing this already (Osaka, Kabuto, etc.).
The prices were unreasonably high. I paid $27 for my steak dinner, for supposedly “filet mignon.” The waitress repeated it like a French chef as she wrote it down, but what came out and got sizzled before my eyes was hardly “filet mignon.” It didn’t taste like filet mignon. The tableside dinners come with some type of soup (broth with 3 mushroom slices, wow!) and a bad-looking ginger-dressing salad (the lettuce was not iceberg, but was not good).
The meal was fine, I guess, but very pedestrian. Our total bill was $67.00 before tip, which included one sushi roll we ate as an appetizer. This was disappointing. The tuna on top had no flavor and looked to be an unnatural red color (neon, really). The roll was bathed in some sickly sweet sauce. Yuck. There’s nothing I can imagine more un-Japanese. Again, it appears this place is run by Chinese.
We won’t be back. A pack of girls out for a birthday dinner (probably in the 5th grade) had a great time behind us. If you want to impress the kids, this place will suffice. But for any type of fine or authentic dining, choose elsewhere.
All I heard on the way home was: “For that money, we could have eaten at Dd33!” Indeed.
One Response to “Kanpai Japanese”
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Said this on October 31st, 2008 at 2:59pm:I agree. One visit is enough. If you are going to pay $60 for two for Asian food, I’d rather go to DD33.