Japanese steakhouse redux

By now, Benihana-style steakhouses, with their knife-savvy chefs launching shrimp aloft, seem practically a throwback to the 1980s, before American diners dared try sushi and Asian food pretty much still meant Chinese. Amazingly, with Japanese steakhouses dotting just about every quadrant of the city, this take on far Eastern cuisine has been experiencing a kind of renaissance of late.

Or maybe it never waned.

Whatever the status of the trend, Kazan Japanese Steakhouse & Sushi has been entertaining diners with culinary stunts at tableside hibachi grills for over six months now. Kazan preserves a romanticized view of Japan. Waitresses stroll by in yukata summer kimonos, novelty cocktail glasses sport giant paper umbrellas and illuminated scenes of waterfalls and snowy mountaintops evoke a cool, pan-Asian panorama. All of this Technicolor Zen staging seems a tad marred by the giant screen TV projecting the day’s sports scores, but the scene is decidedly calmer than your average bar and grill.

One might not expect that a place so concerned with the cooking of food would excel at raw stuff, but the sushi offerings rival any in town. A sushi and sashimi combo ($7.95) included exceptionally fresh tuna sashimi with three large pieces of sushi: shrimp, salmon and tuna from the flavorful fatty underbelly of the tuna. Only a stick of faux crab disappointed.

Entrées include a healthy array of accompaniments: steamed rice, onion soup, a house salad and a choice of appetizer. All of these preliminaries seem aimed at orchestrating a steady but light prologue to the feature performance. The soup was a clear broth suffused with the flavor of scallions, and the salad, though mostly waterlogged iceberg, sported a refreshingly mild ginger dressing.

Just as we were finishing our salads, a chef wheeled over a little cart, and the curtains opened on the main attraction for the evening. After a bit of kitchen gadget percussion with his well-tuned spatulas, our chef drizzled a mysterious liquid over the grill’s surface and set this afire in a brief burst of flames. From here, things calmed down, and the chef settled into the business of cooking our meal. He ladled two similarly thin sauces into ramekins: ginger for seafood, mustard for beef. Both were mild, but we turned to them frequently to flavor our food.

The teppanyaki chefs at Kazan do unto diners as the diners do unto them. Tables more crowded and livelier than ours got more tricks and winks from the chefs. But ours maintained a steady banter, and we enjoyed the distraction of a little culinary voyeurism while he prepared the meal. Remember this the next time you suspect your dinner conversation might be wanting.

Of the appetizer choices, the shrimp and mushrooms seemed almost superfluous. Two shrimp made hardly a mouthful. But chicken livers were a nice change of pace and seemed less gamey for their time on the grill.

The menu offers endless variations of combined seafood, chicken and beef. And while the base ingredients of each dish were exceedingly fresh, the steady temperature of the grill seemed to cook everything to the same texture and flavor. Vegetables like zucchini tasted crisp and sweet, but scallops seemed not seared enough on the exterior, leaving them bland and a bit rubbery. Filet mignon ($18.95) ordered medium rare was on its way to well-done, and the all-too-careful chef kept cutting the pieces to ensure they would cook through. Of all entrees, the sesame chicken ($12.95) bore the most flavor and was not weighted down with the typical syrupy sauce. Purity seemed the order of the day.

Though we were not offered dessert, we didn’t need it. And while the chef had taken liberties with some very un-Asian butter in the entrees, we left free of the heft of typical starchy steakhouse side dishes. Given the inevitable overeating of the holidays, we welcomed this almost novel sensation of lightness.