Food & Drink

BENIHANA, NW3

12 July 2010

The chef’s dish ... Joseph witnesses splendid slices and flicks.

What can seem like eating in the round can be such a hard thing to digest, as Joseph Connolly recently found out

WHO on earth could ever contemplate coming here twice ...? That was the question that went on battering me as my son Charles and I stumbled back out on to the Finchley Road from the lowering basement that is Benihana - an ugly corner building hard by the Ham & High's Swiss Cottage offices, and one of London's unlikeliest restaurants, which nonetheless has somehow survived since the 1970s.

Most people will have some sort of memory of having been here in the mercifully distant past when unavoidably dragooned into some godawful sort of children's celebration or other - for here, really, is the very nub of Benihana: a rather embarrassingly forced and dated poor man's circus: muted entertainment for the kiddies, a few little titbits of inconsequential griddled grub, and all for not too very much more than the price of eating in an excellent restaurant, somewhere else entirely (which I terribly wish I had).

The exterior is festooned with a giant photograph of a very smug Japanese cook, sporting the trademark red toque. Also a vast poster which proclaims in bold: Seven Course Feast From. And that's it. They maybe didn't dare print the starting price for fear of frightening away the few poor deluded punters who occasionally wander down there. Nine, on this particular Thursday evening - including a family of five, all wearing kingfisher blue nylon clothes.

Maybe they were dressed like this for a bet - or possibly they are founder members of a very elite dining club who every Thursday night ferret out the most ludicrous and overpriced place they can find in order to gorge on a Seven Course Feast From: who can say? The tables are all communal here, which makes the whole affair even more disspiriting than it already is. The British are no good at communal - we sort of plaster on a half-smile and then half-eye one another with mild repulsion, if not outright animosity.

We can just about manage communal abroad, but then we are pie-eyed on Sangria and determined to wring out value from the package - we force ourselves upon unsuspecting couples so that on our return we may bore people silly about how very charming and entertaining they were - here sound evidence that our minds had been duly broadened.

On our table there were three teenage schoolgirls, conceivably from South Hampstead up the road, the prettiest of whom was confiding in the others, while sipping a Cosmopolitan, that "like, five-star hotels, yeh? They like not too expensive, rilly." Ah but then what is, when someone else is paying? I actually felt quite sorry for them - of all the places to eat in London - even North London - they had to pitch up here.

I ordered a glass of rose, and Charles had a pint of Asahi beer. Well, not quite a pint, actually: 500cl for £6.15. I looked at the rather fingered menu: no sign of a Seven Course Feast From, but a very basic choice of main ingredient for your 'Hibachi Dinner': steak, chicken or prawn, all plain grilled or teriyaki. Preceeding this was what was billed as 'onion soup with chicken and meat'. That word 'meat' has haunted me for days - what unspeakable flesh could this have possibly been, that they couldn't run to giving it a name...? It hardly mattered - the flavour was largely that of a stock cube, with all the commensurate salt. Then there's a miserable bit of salad - mostly very tired lettuce of the sort that forms the bed for a mingy prawn cocktail, and nobody eats. To which I added side orders of shiitake mushrooms and 'hibachi rice,' which means special fried. They chuck in about three wee prawns to get you going, with some very dull and claggy plain boiled rice. But look! Excitement is about to unfold - the chef is here! In a trademark red toque! Oh, my Lord! He, anyway, seemed to be utterly thrilled by his very own presence, which was more than could be said for the diners. He sliced deftly, and seemed to expect applause. He flicked a prawn up into the air, which landed very stupidly on his hat.

From the expression on his face you would swear that he had just pulled off something beyond extraordianry, or even worthwhile. Then - his name, if I caught it right, was Randy - he urged the prettiest of the schoolgirls to open her mouth so that he could lob a mushroom into it. Being British, she was naturally mortified - but being British, she naturally did as she was told ("Oh my Gaad - this is like just so not going to waark ...!" She was right: the mushroom hit her nose, and then the floor. Then the chef was batting a used lemon quarter into a hole in the hibachi: this, he seemed assured, was Nobel Prize-winning stuff. Then he got the prettiest of the schoolgirls to stand up and do the same - with his expert guidance, wholly predictably. Oh God ... it all was really so very excruciating. As was the food.

Charles's steak was pretty fair, but my miserable little bits of overcooked chicken breast (done teriyaki style, and to hell with plain grilled) were shameful - even somehow managing to be cold. There were piles of fried onions, quite as retch-making as the ones that waft over Hampstead Funfair. Thank God then for the special fried rice - not normally the highlight of any meal - which was flavoursome and sticky in a good way, though in a pitifully small bowl. And by this time you're dreaming about not so much a proper plate of food with all the ingredients on the same plate at the same time, and not just morsels shovelled at you periodically on the whim of a chef, or else thrown up in the air so that you can catch them in your gob like a performing bloody seal ... no, not so much all that as just a bit of air. Because all this time you are sitting around a hotplate the size of a snooker table - and quite apart from the blast furnace effect, this is a very ugly greasy and stained looking thing to be the focal point of dinner. The schoolgirls had wisely legged it by this time - maybe for a nightcap in McDonald's, where the action really is - and by 9pm there were just four people remaining in the restaurant and about twice that many waiters and chefs scowling and loafing about.

Now puddings were, of course, going to be a joke, but I thought, well, okay: I could do with a joke. So let us see...what have we here ...? "Wasabi ice cream. It's new! It's marvellous!". Maybe here is satire and the joke's on us. We decided to share an ice cream tempura, for some quite delirious reason ("my absolute favourite!" crowed the waiter) which turned out to be two small cylinders of vanilla wrapped in a muffler of Mr Kipling sponge cake, the whole liberally coated with cold and coagulated batter - nothing light or crisp about this tempura baby.

Did we want tea or coffee? God no - we wanted to get out of there fast: the staff looked as if they felt the same way, poor devils. So we passed through again the huge and empty bar, seemingly untouched for the past 30 years, where the greeter - having no greeting to do - stood alone at the centre of the room watching a football match on a very large TV set. Oh dear, oh dear - what a place. "It's ... uneasy," is what Charles said - and it is, among very many other things. One of them being quite comically expensive: all these little dribs and drabs I have described (one glass of wine, one glass of beer) came to nearly 80 quid. Service not included. So I think, on balance, that to enjoy this place you have either to be quite hopelessly drunk, or else 11 years old. But here again comes the battering question: who on earth could ever contemplate coming here twice?

Joseph Connolly's latest novel is Love Is Strange (Faber and Faber, £7.99). All previous restaurant reviews may be viewed on the website www.josephconnolly.co.uk.

FACTFILE

BENIHANA

100 Avenue Road, NW3.

Tel: 020 7586 9508.

Open for lunch 12 - 3pm. Dinner Mon - Sat 5.30 - 10.30pm. Sun 5 - 10pm

Food: 2/10

Service: 4/10

Cost: Not much under £100 for two for not much at all. Very bad value.