Benihana, Japanese restaurant in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Benihana is a Japanese teppanyaki restaurant in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where meals are cooked on a hot iron griddle built into each table. Guests sit around the cooking surface and watch as the chef prepares meat, seafood, and vegetables directly in front of them.
The chain was founded in New York in 1964 by Hiroaki Yoshinobu, a Japanese wrestler who wanted to bring teppanyaki cooking to an American audience. Over the following decades, the brand expanded into many countries, eventually reaching Saudi Arabia.
The cooking style at Benihana is called teppanyaki, where a hot iron griddle sits at the center of each table. Watching the chef work up close gives diners a sense of how this style of cooking became popular far beyond Japan.
Booking in advance is strongly recommended, as tables around the griddles fill up quickly, especially on weekends. Since meals are served in groups at shared cooking surfaces, seating may place you alongside other diners you do not know.
The founder of the chain, Hiroaki Yoshinobu, was a professional wrestler before he opened the first restaurant, not a trained chef. He named it after a small café near his childhood home in Tokyo called Benihana, which means red flower in Japanese.
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