Osaka 21

Restaurant Review

Anecdotes & Analysis

The Covington Osaka is a bigger, more ambitious version of the original in Slidell, and the latest Japanese restaurant to embrace the trend back to teppan-yaki grills. The two dining rooms offer completely different experiences. The grill room has hibachi tables at which a dozen or so people of different parties (it’s surprisingly hard to get a conversation started with the others, I always notice) sit around three sides of the big flat-top grill. The chef moves in on the fourth side and performs more or less the same act that all the chefs that came before him in every other restaurant like this performed. Fancy chopping and slicing and tossing around of ingredients, making jokes with the food, and ultimately turning into your plate a very ordinary grilled dinner consisting of chicken or beef or shrimp with various grilled vegetables and rice. It’s fun the first time and maybe the second time, but after that even the kids start getting bored by it. The other dining room is more like what we have become accustomed to in the last decade: a sushi bar, with some standard tables where you can order from a short menu of more traditional, less flashy Japanese eats. All of this is reasonably decent, but nothing spectacular. Hospitality here is sub-optimal. Don’t expect any kind of flexibility in your ordering.

Backstory

The Covington Osaka is a bigger, more ambitious version of the original in Slidell, and the latest Japanese restaurant to embrace the trend back to teppan-yaki grills. The two dining rooms offer completely different experiences. The grill room has hibachi tables at which a dozen or so people of different parties (it’s surprisingly hard to get a conversation started with the others, I always notice) sit around three sides of the big flat-top grill. The chef moves in on the fourth side and performs more or less the same act that all the chefs that came before him in every other restaurant like this performed. Fancy chopping and slicing and tossing around of ingredients, making jokes with the food, and ultimately turning into your plate a very ordinary grilled dinner consisting of chicken or beef or shrimp with various grilled vegetables and rice. It’s fun the first time and maybe the second time, but after that even the kids start getting bored by it. The other dining room is more like what we have become accustomed to in the last decade: a sushi bar, with some standard tables where you can order from a short menu of more traditional, less flashy Japanese eats. All of this is reasonably decent, but nothing spectacular. Hospitality here is sub-optimal. Don’t expect any kind of flexibility in your ordering.