Teppanyaki

All Jaysen wanted for his birthday this year was to go to Sakura for dinner. For those of you that don't know about this restaurant, it is a Japanese Teppanyaki restaurant. You sit around a huge grill and a chef comes and cooks your dinner for you in front of you. Now, Jaysen's birthday is still a week away, so you can imagine my surprise when he walked in the door tonight and said, "Let's go tonight!" So....off we went. Landon was soooo excited to see the "show" that every five seconds he asked when they were going to bring our dinner out. Mackenzee was just plain awnry as usual.
And then....the show began with a big flame...bigger than the one above. Let's just say that Mackenzee was scared to DEATH so much that she had to sit on my lap, bear hugging me so tight I could barely breathe. She wouldn't even look. The ENTIRE time. As bad as I felt for her, I was honestly grateful because at least she sat still. :0) Landon LOVED it! And Jaysen did a bang up job of catching the flying shrimp in his mouth.
Needless to say, we are all extremely full. Though...I'm going to put my two cents in here at the end for those of you that might be interested in visiting this particular restaurant......

Jaysen and I first went to a Teppanyaki style restaurant for his 30th bday up in Boise. Landon went with us and it was great! Good food, great chefs doing great tricks with the spatulas and what not...and Jaysen and I went again this last summer up in Boise for our anniversary. We love it! Which is why Jaysen was thrilled to go to it for his birthday. It's fairly pricey for Chinese Food, but again...special occasions make it ok for me to fork out that much money for my children to NOT eat the food. :0) This place though....we tried to go last weekend after Landon's baptism but they were SO busy because apparently four of their cooks just didn't show up. So, we bailed and went out for Mexican. So, we made sure to get there early tonight so we would get a good seat without the long wait. Now, with these style restaurants, they seat about 10 people around one grill. So, if there are four of us, they usually have you wait a few minutes to see if they can fill up the other chairs before they fire up the grill. I understand that. So, they fill up the chairs and we finally get our soup and salad. Good times...the chef comes out and we get all geared up....and he wasn't NEARLY as good as the guys up in Boise. But, that's ok. I didn't need him to flip the salt shaker up in the air and catch it on his head....and I felt bad for when he tried to spin and flip the egg up in the air and instead of it dropping perfectly on the side of his spatula to crack open, it fell on the ground. Stuff happens. The show wasn't horrible...Landon was entertained. So, we eat our food and the restaurant is getting REALLY busy at this point. All 10 of us at the table are finished eating and we sat there for 20 minutes waiting for someone to bring us a bill. (Actually, our meal came with ice cream...and we never got it. But after 20 minutes, it's not worth it! We've got ice cream at home!) I asked TWO different bus boys about our check and neither of them knew what the crap was going on. Seriously...one of them said, "I just get people the drinks." Are you kidding me? There were about 15 people waiting for a table...if they actually brought us our bill so we could leave, those poor people who had been waiting for 20 minutes could have been seated. Sigh. If we were really naughty, our entire table could have walked out without paying and they wouldn't have even noticed. Even worse, the same lady that said she was missing four cooks last weekend told the lady at the table next to us that she was sorry they had to wait so long because, "four cooks didn't show up" so they were understaffed. Apparently it's THE excuse they use because they don't want to have a full staff. We got home TWO hours after we left for the restaurant...the restaurant is about 5 minutes away.

There...I've let it all out now. I don't feel better. I seriously spent some money tonight on DINNER and so to have such crappy service really annoyed me. Really good food though. So, for those of you in Twin Falls, maybe try it on a week night so you don't have to worry about this.

Happy eating!