Benihana

good décor and service sadly awful food!
Lame rolls, the chef didn’t deliver food cooked teppanyaki style, burnt vegetables i asked for a medium steak the chef cooked it well done as and argentine to eat well done steak is almost a sin, not happy! while cooking it i told him i want my steak medium and he ignore me (chef is in the pic)
not coming back!
and if you appreciate your money you shouldn’t!

Decided to go to Benihana for lunch (quite reasonable at £16 for the traditional chicken dinner cooked in front of you), I’d never been before so I found it pretty entertaining. The food wasn’t overly flavourful, but nice.
Would definitely recommend coming for lunch over dinner, as both menus seem similar but dinners go up to around £30, which seems a bit much.
It wasn’t busy on a Sunday lunchtime and the service was enthusiastic and polite.

This is a popular chain in the US that has found its way to London. Not authentic by any means but its always a fun experience watching the food being prepared and cooked. Come here for the entertainment rather than the food itself. Portions are small, and the bill is large.

Reasonably expensive — but totally worth the money and a great choice for a special occassion. If you choose this venue you are going for the experience and the quality of the food is an added extra!
Be sure to book in advance as it can get very packed on popular nights (Fri, Sat) and I can highly recommend the Plum Wine (which comes in a huge glass with ice).

The Sushi and the Sashimi was great but the Teppanyaki with a chef from Somewhere else then Japan with show skils was probably ok 1977, 2015 you also need to serve great food.

I read another review and choose not to come here but I was wrong. I tried the other place Matsuri St James, which was not very good and no where to Benihana. Very good service and really, really tasty food. Best food I have had in London.

Our experience at Benihana was excellent for my soon to be wife and me! Food we selected was awesome and the chef entertained us throughout. High recommend this place.

I have been to several restaurants, where you can eat Teppanyaki and this one is a good place to go.
Service: very good
Cook: very entertaining and skilled
Food: delicious
It is not the best of the best (like the Sazanka in Amsterdam), but still very, very good.
I will happily be their guest next time around.

Very MEDIOCRE. I was excited to go to Benihana for a birthday party because I’d heard it was great and have been to a similar restaurant which also has chefs who cook at the table and entertain. I was very disappointed then with the extremely average food (nothing particularly yummy) and the boring way the chef prepared the food. I have been to just one other place like this in a tiny town in upstate NY, and it was miles beyond this place. This chef just did a volcano and didn’t seem to even be paying attention to all the people watching him. (The other one I went to amazed us with his chopping and flipping skills and squirted drinks into everyones mouths)
Benihana is also very overpriced for what you get. Do not go, please avoid! You can spend your hard-​earned money somewhere else much more fun and with better food.

Since we heard quite good reviews about this restaurant before we booked a table for our London trip last year, we had very high expectations. Unfortunately it wasn’t anywhere near those expectations. At most the food was avarage and it was all about sitting near when they cooked the food. It was a show. It felt as the whole thing was 90% show and 10% okay food.

This is the first time that I had experienced Tepankaki, so I never had anything to compare it to. I had a great time, we had a really nice group of people on the table, and the chef was pretty entertaining. The food was delicious, I just thought it was slightly over priced for what it was.
Never the less, if you are looking for a fun evening out then you may want to consider coming here :)

The chefs are very talented and its a real talking point/​ice breaker watching them cook in front of you and throw bits of food into your mouth. But you get an astonishingly small amount of food for the money. We had once course which set me back about £60 (not including drinks) and I was still starving when we left

This is the first time that I have had teppanyaki in the UK. It was a good experience, although it was a little overpriced.
You go to a teppanyaki restaurant for the entertainment from the chef. He did a few cool things which were nice touches: I liked the volcano made of stacked, sliced onions. He also did some impromptu karaōke, which was lame, but funny.
With teppanyaki, you often need to wait until the table around the hot plate is full before you start the dinner. This is the case here, but as it was a busy night we didn’t have to wait too long.
We had Rocky’s Choice for £36 and Hibachi Steak for £28.50. These are set menus which come with a salad, vegetables, a miso soup and rice. I thought that it wasn’t as tasty as back home in New Zealand (I miss the «yum yum» sauce!) but it was still good. The chef spilled some water on my meal during his tricks, but I’ll forgive him this.

A bit of Teppanyaki theatre to tickle the taste buds.
I’ve only been twice and both times I had the set menu which is £23.00 a head. You get to chose the meat/​fish you’d like to be cooked before your eyes and it comes with various vegetables and few other side dishes. Not bad value. If you’re not big on group interaction then this isn’t the type of dining for you, as you sit at a cooking pod with other diners (8 per pod). The chefs are skilled and do fun tricks but the banter is a little cheesy. Service in general is good. The only down point is the décor is rather dated and the ladies loos are horrid. Benihana is a chain so others may be better…
Would consider coming here with a group of friends to take up one of the cooking pods.

I can highly recommend Benihana in Piccadilly. It ticks every box for a great, fun and delicious dinner out, whether you’re in a group or on a first date.
The staff are extremely friendly and attentive, without being too much. We were greeted by our chef — great guy called Francis and he was very good at his job… keeping the diners entertained, knowing what we all had ordered, showing off his culinery skills and finally getting the delicious food to our plates in spot on time.
The only tiny point which doesn’t really need much of a comment was the rather squeaky/​wonky chair I had. But saying this, I soon forgot that it was wonky once the food was being prepared so skillfully and upon tasting it — Delicious… Did I say ‘wonky chair?’ What wonky chair?
I’ll be going back and should make more of an evening of it I hope, as my company and I were dashing off to the theatre.
Thanks Benihana — Superb!

When I was small, the treat né plus ultra for my family involved a trip to Port Solent cinema and then to the Char Bar where you could whisper it cook your OWN FOOD. Never mind that we could quite easily have done this at home instead of leaving it all to my poor mum, this was properly being a grown-​up.
So Benihana must be even more grown-​up because you have someone doing the cooking for you, but you can WATCH THEM (no, it’s actually just like mum again).
And bless it, it’s incredibly 90s. The food was… fine. The chef cooking it was… a bit mortifying actually. Incredibly dated, but fine if you like that sort of thing, but really — it’s no Char Bar.

I first went to a Benihana restaurant in Toronto and left feeling very happy and sated. it was a marvellous and fun dining experience. So when I found out there was one in London I jumped at the chance.
As other reviewers have pointed out this is a Teppanyaki restaurant (this being Japanese cuisine that uses an iron griddle to cook food for the lay man). You will usually sit six to eight (sometimes more) people around a central grill (there are several of these grills with similar seating arrangements all around the restaurant) and the chef will take your order and cook the food in front of you. There is some entertainment value to this type of experience and I think I would definitely consider this a first of second date place — if you want to show 1) you like food and 2) you are a fun kinda person.
Overall I thought that the food was good and that this place had a nice atmosphere and that the staff were good. It was not as nice as the one in Toronto but given that is a 7 hour flight to Toronto and that my oyster card doesn’t quite extend that far this place will have to do.

I’ve been recommending this for a while on Twitter for anyone celebrating a special occasion. The cocktails are delicious (especially the ones including japanese sake) and the staff are always friendly. The best thing though is when you sit down at the table.
If you’ve never eaten teppanyaki food before, it’s basically food cooked on a large flat grill. In this case, the grill is sat in the middle of your table, which you may be sharing with other groups depending on the size of yours.
You order your food, for example steak, prawns and chicken, and you’re bought a bowl of miso soup and sushi whilst you wait for the chef.
The chef comes out, introduces himself, and has a little joke with everyone. The food is cooked in front of you, including egg fried rice from scratch. Knives are flipped, mini onion volcanos are created, delicious food is served.
Go when the meal deal is on and enjoy an entertaining night out and some fresh and tasty food.

I’ve brought a few friends to Benihana as it’s the closest teppanyaki to the West End. Unfortunately, as noted by the dynamic husband and wife Unilocaling team of Larissa D & Robert D, Benihana has failed to deliver many more times than it did.
The entertainment value of the chef is the main reason people pay to come to such places and at Benihana, they seem to rely a lot more on the patter than practising hard to perfect those familiar moves — the egg cracking on the spatula, the onion volcano, the juggling to name a few. As the chefs are exclusively male in my experience, the patter also has a very male orientated bias to it, which can leave the female guests around the table feeling rather left out.
To compound the lack of flair and entertaining moves, they have a tendency to overcook the food. I’ve had to request that my chicken be removed off the hot plate quite a few times as I watched it being dessicated from prolonged cooking. They always ask how you would like your steak cooked and I don’t think medium rare is in their vocabulary. I’m not as forthright as an American diner on my last visit, who had a standup row over her steak which was definitely not medium rare as requested.
The sushi and sashimi is reasonable but expensive. They do run some specials which reduces the price but I usually leave feeling that I’ve not got full VFM.

I originally come from Orlando, Florida, a city of no fewer than 50 Japanese hibachi grill/​teppenyaki restaurants. A celebratory visit to one of these restaurants with friends is, literally, a cultural phenomena, and I guess you could call me a hibachi grill restaurant aficionado.
The concept is simple and will be the same no matter which hibachi grill restaurant you visit. Eight people sit around a sizzling hot grill and order food. A chef arrives, cooks. The people eat. Add to that some comedy, some stock chef tricks and the consumption of alcohol and you’ve got a recipe for a great night out.
Sadly, it’s not quite as easy as that, as the level of your enjoyment is directly related to the ability and enthusiasm of your chef. I’ve been to this Benihana location twice over the course of two years, and both times my experience has been simply average and generally not worth the inflated London price.
I always expect to see a couple of things from my vantage point at the hibachi grill. These range from the onion volcano, the always-​comedic tossing of cooked food into another diner’s mouth (points detracted if you are the unlucky sap at the table selected to catch the food), general utensil flipping skills, and the arrangement of fried rice in some sort of recognizable/​cutesy shape.
Last night, I saw none of the above things. Instead, our chef spent the food preparation time cracking football jokes and taking the piss out of diners for the teams they supported and proceeded to sing Arsenal chants for the meal’s entirety.
And note that it’s always highly suspect when your chef isn’t actually Japanese or even of an Asian persuasion.
Ultimately, for the price you pay for a meal, it’s quite a gamble going to this particular Benihana location, as you’re not guaranteed to have one of the good chefs, who inevitably is cooking at the table next to yours instead.
But even if you get a not-​so-​theatrical chef, the act of watching your (good quality) food being prepared in front of you offers an unusual and generally enjoyable dining experience, even if the complementary components of the meal were generally forgettable.