No mo’ show at GoJo?

​Larry and Barb from Lake Waukomis, Missouri, e-mailed us this week with an intriguing question.

“We’ve gone to GoJo’s since it opened and still enjoy the food. But there’s no show anymore,” wrote Larry, noting that when teppanyaki steakhouses like GoJo were all the rage in Kansas City, “most of their cooks/chefs put on quite a show. They were jugglers, percussionists and all ’round showmen, but now it seems that they just do a perfunctory basic cooking routine.”

Larry and Barb want to find a Japanese steakhouse where the cooks still juggle pepper mills, flip cooked shrimp into the mouths of giggling patrons, break eggs (“Bad egg!”), build volcanoes out of raw onion rings and make bad jokes. I could hardly understand why — as most Fat City readers know, I find the “show” at Japanese steakhouses to be sort of tiresome. I mean, once you’ve seen one flaming onion volcano, haven’t you them all?

Still, I found it difficult to imagine that the grillmasters at GoJo, one of the city’s oldest and busiest teppanyaki restaurants, would resort to a “perfunctory basic cooking routine” since it’s more of a tourist draw than anything else.