Tag: Benihana

Benihana Kuwait: The Bloggers respond

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Bloggers respond! We are reposting Mark’s original post today to protest Benihana Kuwait’s action and urge the company to drop its unfair and stupid lawsuit.

 

My Benihana Experience

A few days back I posted about Benihana opening up at the Avenues and yesterday night I decided to pass by with Nat and try it out. The service wasn’t too bad for a restaurant that’s just been open for a few days and the staff were really friendly. The restaurant itself is made up of islands and bars with a grill in the middle of each one. You sit around the grill and the chef will come to your table and prepare the food right in front of you which makes things entertaining. It’s actually why I prefer sitting at the bar in Japanese restaurants in general, since you can talk to the chef and watch them put your dish together. The problem with my experience last night though was with the food, it was disappointing to say the least.

We ordered beef negimayaki for starters followed by an Orange Blossom maki and a Hibachi Chicken. The negimaki arrived looking good and was probably the best thing we had there even though I prefer Maki’s negimaki which has a richer teriyaki sauce. The Orange Blossom was very ordinary, wouldn’t order it again. Now the Hibachi chicken which is basically grilled chicken, that was the worst. The chicken was very chewy (I could swear it was undercooked if not raw) and tasted terrible. Even after I had the chef add some more teriyaki sauce in hopes of improving the taste it didn’t work. I tried to dip it into the sauces that came with the chicken but it was hard to figure out if they were actually making things worse or not. Nat only ate one piece of chicken and left the rest while I needed my protein since I’m on a strict diet and forced myself to eat my whole plate (I can do that) but the after taste was really bad. Even the rice and the veggies that came with it tasted bad AND were under cooked. Once we left I considered picking up a frozen yogurt from Pinkberry even though I hate frozen yogurts but I just needed something to get rid of the aftertaste. A few moments later we ended up at Chocolate Bar ordering the gooey chocolate cake (bye bye diet).

I shot the two videos above of the chef preparing our meal. Benihana are known for the live shows they perform when preparing your dish so I was expecting to see [This] but ended up with the above . Would I go back to Benihana? No I wouldn’t. Their sashimi and maki’s are pretty cheap (KD1.5 for 5 pieces of Salmon sashimi for example) but there are two other Japanese restaurants at the Avenues, Wasabi and Maki, and I would prefer either one of those to Benihana.

Check yourself, before you wreck yourself

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I just amended my previous blog regarding a certain shop in Al Manara. I had to protect myself and ensure that they didn’t try to sue me for complaining about the way I was treated by them two years ago. They are rich enough to sue my arse and I want my hard earned money to go to my holiday fund rather than for them to buy some more designer swag so I self-censored myself.

If you read my tweets and occasional FB status messages you would know that I am pretty open and unpolicitcally correct. Even my tag line on this blog says “I say what I think and write as I speak” (or something like that). So you can imagine that I am pretty peeved off for having to edit my blog.

I have had to delete a blog previously as it was regarding my ex-boyfriend who was a local. Nothing really derogatory in it, except that I dumped him on said blog, but friends immediately told me to remove it as he could give the blog piece to the police and get me arrested if he felt like it. Luckily as much as we weren’t meant to be together, he wasn’t a spiteful man so i’m free to still blog.

The deleting of the ex-bf blog was self-preservation. The editing is due to the Benihana Kuwait matter which has riled us bloggers no end this week. The piece from @mark248am (http://www.248am.com/mark/kuwait/my-benihana-experience/) (I don’t know how to be clever and make it a click widget so just copy and paste the link boys and girls) was not as negative as some reviews can be in this day and age, but he has now been sued by Benihana for his blog piece.

I have a bad feeing that other corporations, that have no real grasp of social media will take this as a benchmark to start suing others who give negative reviews about their products and services. Instead of embracing social media and its power in this world, they will try to stifle the opinions, creativity and openness which arises from the use of social media.

My reason for blogging is two fold – I was told that I was taking up to much of my tweeps twitter time line with my ranting and raving and also I needed a proper outlet to write. I had lost my writing mojo for many years, but this forum that I created allowed me to express my normal self for my friends and other members of the public to see.

If I was to lose this platform would I implode? Most probably not.

Would my blog be missed? I don’t really think so.

But would I be happy? Most definitely not. So if I can gain happiness from something like my blog who is anyone to stop me from being happy? 

For now I will ensure that I don’t get too negative, but hopefully this stupidity will cease so that we can all go back to being our normal ranting/raving opinionated bloggers.