By Ashwin Johri

Kabuto, Japanese House of Steaks is a restaurant and sushi bar on West Broad Street that has served Richmond for over 40 years. It features teppanyaki-style cooking, where the chef cooks in front of patrons on a metal plate called a teppan. These hibachi chefs cook in front of you, putting on an impressive presentation while you get to see your dinner being created and served to you in a theatrical way. 

After walking up the marble steps into Kabuto’s traditional Japanese design, I am greeted with a beautiful display of a starry sky on the ceiling and koi fish in a pond. The waiters, dressed in traditional Japanese kimono and hakama, lead me to a large and open seating area with numerous teppan for the chefs to cook in front of me. The walls are lined with traditional Japanese portraits of elegantly dressed women, and there is pleasant Japanese background music playing, barely audible amongst the sounds of the chefs cooking and the diners talking to each other. Although families are usually seated together, on this visit, each family had their own table to allow for social distancing. 

I am served a clear soup with scallions and sliced mushrooms and a tossed salad with a traditional ginger dressing as an appetizer. The soup is salty, with the mushrooms adding an earthy flavor to the otherwise light soup.

The salad, containing lettuce, sliced carrots, sliced cucumbers, red cabbage, and a signature ginger/soy dressing, delivered a distinctive tangy taste and crunchy texture.

When the hibachi chef arrives with their cart of ingredients, he cleans the grill while taking my order. I order a chicken hibachi dish with vegetables and fried rice. The chef whips out his special hibachi knives, clanging them around systematically as he cuts the meat and vegetables being served, and cracks and scrambles the eggs going in the fried rice. He adds carrots, peas, the already scrambled eggs, a generous portion of soy sauce, and butter to the rice before placing a large portion onto my plate.

Next, the chef starts cooking broccoli, more sliced carrots, white onions, mushrooms, and zucchini with butter, oil, soy sauce, and traditional seasoning. He performs a classic hibachi trick by stacking different layers of the onion on top of each other, putting oil in the center, and lighting it on fire to create an “onion volcano,” with flames that almost reach the ceiling and spread the warmth around the whole table for a few seconds.

The chef has also been preparing the chicken alongside the vegetables and rice, cutting it and flipping it after occasional dashes of lemon and butter. However, now he brings it into the forefront, adding lots of soy sauce and dicing the chicken into cubes. He serves liberal portions of vegetables and meat to everyone at the table before scrubbing down the teppan. The hibachi chef displayed his incredible skill in cooking and performing for the patrons throughout my dinner, and his show added plenty to my experience dining at Kabuto.

The entree itself tasted amazing. The fried rice had a distinctive flavor that I had not tasted in other fried rice before—possibly because of the liberal amounts of butter and soy sauce added. The appetizing, aromatic rice was cooked perfectly, supplemented by an even mixture of peas, carrots, and eggs to give the rice a different flavor than traditional Japanese fried rice. The mushrooms, onions, zucchini, and broccoli are crisp and flavorful thanks to the soy sauce.

The meat itself is extremely delicious, tender, and juicy. Most surprisingly, my favorite part of the dinner was the mayonnaise-based “yum yum” sauce provided with the entree. Its sweet taste provided a contrast between the savoriness of the meat and vegetables and added a rich and creamy texture to the fried rice. In addition to the masterful performance put on by the hibachi chef during the preparation of our meal, the food itself was excellently cooked and unlike any other Japanese cuisine I have had before. I will continue to visit Kabuto, Japanese House of Steaks whenever I want a fulfilling and entertaining Japanese meal.

All photos by Ashwin Johri.