For a fun time, visit Osaka. For consistently good food and a truly unique dining experience, look elsewhere.
Our dinner at Osaka Japanese Sushi & Steakhouse was accompanied by many highs and lows, and each diner in our party experienced a different Osaka.
Osaka is tucked away on a Coolidge Corner side street facing Peet’s Coffee & Tea. If Osaka were a stop on a highway, its neon signing and low-lit interior might possess some noirish romanticism, like a diner in a David Lynch film. In this netherworld between storefronts in a suburb, it just seems misplaced.
Its second-rate location, however, suggests little of the liveliness that it harbors inside. The restaurant hosts teppanyaki, a style of cooking in which the chef prepares the food on a grill built into your table with the addition of crowd-pleasing theatrics: throwing food, juggling knives, and setting fire to the table.
There is a reason that Michael Scott in “The Office” once called Benihana, the Florida-based chain that popularized teppanyaki, an “Asian Hooters.” Teppanyaki is, at least in the West, a cheesy novelty at best.
[su_column]Osaka: 14 Green St., Brookline, MA 02446 (617) 732-0088 Mon-Wed: 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m. Fri-Sat: 11:00 a.m.-2 a.m. Thurs & Sun: 11:00 a.m.-Midnight[/su_column]
It is also, however, undeniably fun. The chefs at Osaka sling sauce and drum their knives against the grill as if auditioning for the Blue Man Group.
And Osaka, to its credit, has a little more class than Benihana. You will not find any massive samurai statues here, and the muted tones of the restaurant’s marble walling suit office workers just as it does rowdy college students.
The Miso Soup ($2.25) proved to be very fulfilling at a fair price. Complete with seaweed and tofu, the soup’s flavors were all in line, a hit.
Just after the miso arrived, along came the Tekka Maki ($5.95). While this dish relies on the freshness of the tuna, the simple tuna of this roll was a miss. The roll presented a flavor not terrible, but just off. The Spicy Tuna Roll ($6.75) had a much better flavor, crisp and satisfying, but the inconsistency in the sushi was disappointing nevertheless.
Soon after these arrived, the chef came and started the grill. Laughter and cheers erupted from our table. He started off with the well-known wall of fire, soon followed by the onion volcano.
The sizzling fried rice was made first, as the chef added in the traditional egg and vegetables. The fried rice, served with all hibachi orders, was a high point of the dinner. Its traditional flavor and multitude of spices made it a good start to the meal. It was hard not to finish the rice right then and there, but it had to be saved to accompany the meat.
The noodles were cooked later in the culinary performance, but they proved to be a little too rich, with a little too much seasoning. Unfortunately, most of our party’s noodles ended up in to-go bags as a result.
The food, while nothing terrible, made it clear that you are paying for the show. The blander meats in conjunction with the overloaded noodles did nothing to justify the price tags for the hibachi meals, which varied in price. Our party ordered the Hibachi Salmon ($23.95) and the Hibachi Angus Steak ($26.95).
From the non-hibachi menu, the Nabe Yaki Udon ($15.95), a stew of thick udon noodles, egg, fish cake and tempura shrimp, made for perfectly good comfort food. But for the same price, you could order the Nabeyaki-Udon at Ginza Japanese Restaurant on Beacon Street and gain an actual appreciation for flavor.
Osaka is too reserved to be a Benihana and too flavorless to be a Ginza. Once you get past the lively novelty of teppanyaki, it becomes just another Japanese restaurant, serving the usual dishes for the same prices as its more consistent peers.
Clasby Chope and Emma Nash can be contacted at [email protected]
