Here To Eat: Ace Eats America 10 Plates at a Time

Benihana Marina
Price: $26.99
Rating: *** / *****
Since it was free: ***** / *****

I resented and hated them, the screech of their cackling was resonating against the building fury of my hunger and anguish.

"You bitch!" I shouted in the middle of the Staples.

The manager came up to me, "Insane fantasy episode of your friends making fun of you at lunch while you're making your third trip around Staples pretending to look for a USB cord?"

"Fucking right," I proclaimed.

He nodded knowingly, "Right this way, sir." The billowing doors opened and I stepped through without a fight.

And that's the story of how I ended up institutionalized the first time. Wait...actually, this was the time I went to Benihana's with my good pals Pillin and Ariana. You see, I was supposed to take them there for a work banquet and then find a way to kill time and wait for them. So after dropping them off, I moped around inside a Staples across the street to kill time. Soon after my third trip around Staples, however, I got a phone call from Ariana and it wasn't her telling me to go buy one of those ridiculous easy buttons that were on sale. She said to come join them. Awesome. Apparently her boss wasn't paying any attention so I could sneak in, eat, and make him pay the tab without ever having to meet the guy. Kind of like ninja-eating, though I'm not sure ninjas wore glasses. That may have been embellished a bit, but that was the general timeline of the day.

After the chef person came out, I ordered the Benihana Marina. The menu said that the Benihana Marina came with scallops, calamari, and shrimp. To my surprise, the chefman threw down some fish on the hibachi instead of calamari. I thought that I had read the menu wrong, but I looked it up online and indeed, the calamari was somehow replaced with fish. Damn. Well, that just threw the whole thing off. The delightfully rubbery texture of the squid would've made for a more interesting meal. What I got instead was ho-hum fish that was very forgettable.

The first course handed out was a simple mushroom broth garnished with fried onion pieces. It was mild and nice, but nothing out of the ordinary.


We also got a salad doused with Asian dressing, which I'm not a big fan of. The bitterness made it rather inedible and it was nothing more than filler for the real food. Eventually, the teppanyaki chef started preparing a simple chicken fried rice that was quite delectable. I appreciated the fact that he teased the small child at the table with a bowl trick, as tormenting young children never grows old. He went on to prepare my meal and make those fascinating onion volcanos.


As mentioned before, the fish was nothing special, I found it to be a bit bland and too firm for my liking. I like my fish either fried or steamed. The shrimp was...eh, I eat shrimp all the time so it was nothing special. Not to say that it wasn't good and well cooked, but I wasn't in love with it. I thought the best part of the meal was the scallops. They were done just right, firm but soft to the tooth and not at all overcooked. I could eat those scallops with the fried rice all day. I ended up stealing some of Pillin's steak, and that stuff melts in your mouth. That was excellent stuff.


(here is a picture of Pillin happily eating fried rice and Ariana cringing at the thought of being around me.)

Overall, it was a very good experience that could've used a bit more food flinging and perhaps some live fireworks. I was disappointed that I got fish instead of calamari, but that was a simple mistake. The other main courses were tasty, if not overpriced, and I would gladly go again, especially if it were on the house.

P.S. - Happy New Year, everybody. Hope you all had a good time, I know I did.

Posted by Anthony Nguyen on Monday, January 01, 2007 at 3:26 PM | Permalink