Hibachi and Mushrooms and Flames, Oh My!

I believe I have mentioned before that I teach preschool. Let me begin this post with a funny preschool story. One year, I was teaching 2 year olds, and had a very verbose girl in my class. This girl had just turned two and spoke better than some adults I have known. However, she always called herself, "you." I suppose this makes sense as it was how others would have referred to her. One day this small person said to me (and remember, this was within only a couple months of her turning two) "Last night, you went to the Japanese restaurant, and they cooked a fire!"

Well,  Friday night I went to the Japanese restaurant, and they cooked a fire! My very good friend Keli told me a couple weeks ago that she was going to take me out to dinner for a late birthday celebration.  Originally, the plan was to go the Cheesecake Factory, but the Cheesecake Factory is about an hour away, and we were trying to come up with other ideas.  A few days before the intended dinner, Keli asked if I'd ever been to a Japanese Steakhouse.  I said that I had not, but that I was certainly up for trying one out! 


I believe the hibachi experience is pretty similar wherever you go, but it was all new to me.  Our meal started with clear soup and house salad with ginger dressing. 

I picked out the offending mushrooms, and tried the clear soup, but I wasn't thrilled with it.  It needed...something...anything.  I had several tastes of it because I know sometimes I need to get used to something, but it just wasn't doing anything for me.   The ginger dressing on the salad was yummy, but there was seriously WAY too much of it.  The lettuce was floating.  I'm the kind of girl who makes a huge salad and puts a tablespoon of dressing on the whole thing, so having a massive amount of dressing on a tiny salad was not appealing to me.  Still, it was tasty. 

As we moved on to the Hibachi portion of the experience, I was pretty excited.  I've been to a Mongolian Grill (Oh BD's, how I love thee), so I've seen some cool tricks, but this guy was pretty impressive.  I particularly enjoyed watching him bounce and crack the eggs over his metal spatula. 
The fried rice was yummy, but I wanted to taste everything together, so I didn't eat much before the other portions were on my plate. 

The flaming tower of onion rings was fun! Keli warned me it was coming so I'd be able to get a picture.  :)  The veggies were good, but I was a little troubled by the fact that there were mushrooms all mixed in.  As soon as they got on my plate I popped one mushroom in my mouth in an effort to be brave.  I chewed it up and swallowed it, but I came pretty close to gagging.  There is something I really don't like about the texture.  Maybe someday I'll get over that.  I'm sure I had some mixed in with my other veggies, but they didn't seem to bother me. 

I ordered chicken with my meal, and that was really good.  I especially liked it all mixed together with some of the ginger sauce they gave us drizzled on top.  The whole experience was really enjoyable.  The food was good, and the flames and tricks were fun to watch.  I would say though, that if given the choice, I'd choose BD's Mongolian grill over a Japanese Steakhouse everytime.  There are just so many more choice and you don't have to try to pick around the things you aren't crazy about.  Still, I'm really glad we did this.  It pushed me a little more out of my food comfort zone, and turned out to be really good!