Fuji-rama

One of the reasons I’m not crazy about eating in Japanese steakhouses is that I don’t like sharing tables with strangers. It sounds snobbish, but it’s really more Freudian than that. It’s a lingering dread that dates back to my high school cafeteria, when I always wound up sitting at a long communal table (in a dining room that looked like the prison mess hall in White Heat) with someone I didn’t like or some honor-roll type who didn’t like me. Finally, I just stopped eating lunch and spent that hour puffing on cigarettes outside with all the other juvenile delinquents.

A few weeks ago, I got that same uncomfortable feeling when my friend Bob decided it would be fun for a group of us to go to one of those fund-raising all-you-can-eat shrimp dinners at a church hall. Once again, I was sitting at a long, communal table across from two strangers. The couple seemed nice enough, and I’m still not sure how the conversation veered from their old house to their sex life, but it did. And an interesting sex life it was, full of such vivid imagery that at one point I had to put my hands over the ears of the little kid sitting next to me.

“It was a story about someone getting a blow job at Balanca’s,” I told my friend Jennifer a few nights later as we settled into yet another communal dining setup. This time it was at the shiny black-granite counter surrounding the teppan-yaki grill at the seven-month-old Fuji Steak and Sushi Restaurant. The third member of our party, Steve, was already sitting there, sipping a zombie cocktail and leering lasciviously at the incredibly handsome waiter standing at attention behind the grill.

“I’ve never had a zombie before,” Steve confessed. “They’re far too sweet. All that rum.”

The cocktail reminded Jennifer of the last time she and I dined at a Japanese steakhouse, a place way out in Independence. We were seated at a grill already occupied by six members of an extremely uptight, religious family, all of whom blanched when Jennifer asked the waitress for a piña colada. When the festive drink arrived, the matriarch of the clan glared at Jennifer as if she were a harlot.

But luck was with us at Fuji on this particular Monday night. Not only did we have practically the entire restaurant to ourselves (there was a table of well-behaved men in suits on the other side of the room); we also had exclusive rights to the teppan-yaki grill and the good-looking Norman, who brought us a shrimp tempura roll and a Fuji roll (a pretty combination of salmon, crab, tuna, avocado and cucumber) while we examined the laminated menu.

This new Fuji is much more elaborate than owner John and Lina Tai’s previous restaurant of the same name, formerly located at 95th Street and Antioch in Overland Park. For one thing, they’ve decorated the place with all kinds of “Oriental Antique Upper Grade Class” — that’s what the business card says, anyway — including a lifelike tree carved from a single piece of jade and the goddess Quan Yin carved from ivory. “That explains all the ‘Do Not Touch’ signs all over the restaurant,” Jennifer whispered. I had been more impressed with the grouping of “celebrity” photographs at the entrance, which seemed to be mostly professional athletes and, in the center, beaming like a beneficent Buddha, Jackson County Executive Katheryn Shields.

“The place is packed on weekends,” a friend of mine had warned me, “because that’s when all the tourists go to Westport. But during the week, it’s very laid-back.”

This same friend goes to Fuji for the sushi, which she says is cheaper than that at rival Matsu down the street, and because it has a sexier chef — Andy from Micronesia — working his skills at the sushi bar in the very back of the restaurant (which still bears the distinctive linoleum floor tiles of the previous tenant, Einstein Bros. Bagels). This sushi section is illuminated by a giant aquarium filled with tropical fish, and Andy stands impassively behind the traditional raw-fish-filled refrigerated case, just waiting for requests to pull out a sweet-dragon roll. You know, eel over shrimp tempura.

The Tais probably need to put a “Do Not Touch” sign in front of Andy and, for that matter, Norman, too. The Korean-American waiter diplomatically ignored Steve’s lustful glances as he cheerfully brought out the beginnings of the teppan-yaki dinner package: a little salad of iceberg lettuce drenched in a gingery dressing, followed by a small cup of amber-colored “onion” broth.

At this point, Norman stepped away and one of the restaurant’s two teppan-yaki chefs took the spotlight under the gleaming steel exhaust fan. Mexican-born Saul, whose name is tattooed on his fingers, had been working the grill for only two weeks, but he was already masterful in all the high-speed chopping, pepper-mill twirling, salt shaking and egg frying that go with the job. Even better, he didn’t rattle off any of the bad jokes that usually accompany the teppan-yaki show (cracking an egg and muttering, “Bad chicken,” for example). He simply smiled and cooked. Alas, he wasn’t quite as proficient in the art of flipping a cooked shrimp into one of our open mouths. Mine hit me in the eye, but c’est la vie.

Steve ordered the lobster dinner and enjoyed the drama surrounding its preparation: two lobster tails were grilled, then removed from their shells, drizzled with butter and soy sauce, chopped into pieces and returned to the shells. He wasn’t so pleased with the result, though. “It tastes chewy and smells fishy,” he sniffed.

Jennifer was perfectly happy with her inexpensive steak-and-scallops combination, and I was impressed with the size of the big, puffy scallops swept up from the grill and deposited on her plate. My own dinner, a shrimp-and-salmon combo, was tasty enough, but seeing the food — including bland ingredients such as mushrooms, zucchini and onion — deftly cooked in front of you makes the experience seem like more of a culinary thrill than it really is.

A few days later, I returned with friends Bob and Gia. Once again, we had the grill to ourselves. Gia was relieved. “I mean, sometimes you can get stuck with some weirdos,” she said.

But what’s weirder than three adults sitting around a white-hot grill and clapping like children after a tattooed chef creates a steaming volcano from the rings of a white onion? The entire Japanese-steakhouse dining experience has its Twilight Zone elements even before you throw strangers into the equation. And just like at my previous dinner, I was reminded that things sometimes look better than they taste. “What is this sauce?” I asked the chef, pointing to a tiny dish that he had filled from a metal canister with a lukewarm mustard-colored liquid.

“Hollandaise sauce,” he said, smiling. “Dip your shrimp in it.”

Bravely, I did — and tasted none of the traditional ingredients of Hollandaise, such as egg yolks or lemon juice. I mean, God only knows what was in it. The other dipping sauce, which was the shade of a plum-colored crayon, was supposedly a ginger concoction but tasted more like a melted Tootsie Pop.

But the theatrical, sensual ingredients — the tiny bowls of hot soup and cold salad, the flying shrimp, the noisy chopping and the sizzling oil that ignites into crackling flames — are far more important than the food. Once the chef had packed up his cart and rolled it off, it felt as if the curtain had come down on a play. Gia picked at her dinner. I had already eaten every bite of my teriyaki steak as well as the accompanying vegetables and fried rice and was ready to go home. For Bob, however, the show was still on as he happily, leisurely enjoyed chunks of grilled filet mignon, teriyaki chicken and shrimp.

So as a finale, we ordered dessert: green-tea ice cream and cheesecake. The ice cream was such a vivid shade of green that I wondered whether it had been made with tea or kryptonite. The cheesecake, though, was fluffy, light and delicious. The waitress told me it was from the Cheesecake Factory.

Only a couple of other diners ventured in while we were eating, which surprised us because the place is attractive, the food is good and the prices are decent. So what’s the deal? I figured it’s the universal fear of eating with a stranger.