Hibachi and Teppanyaki in Old Newspaper Ads
And, the 'junk fees' conversation is goofy
California has just passed a ban on “junk fees,” which is an action I support fully, wholeheartedly, completely. But good gosh everything about the ban and the restaurant industry’s reaction to it is inane.
The authors of the bill — the state attorney general and two state senators — have refused to answer any formal questions about the unclear portions, which is clearly because they don’t understand what they wrote, as their off-the-cuff answers made clear. (I think they didn’t ask their finance guys whether a “surcharge” is pre- or post-tax, that sort of thing.)
Food delivery apps are exempt from the ban. Food delivery apps specifically are still allowed to hide charges until the customer gets to the payment screen. That seems exceptionally silly and I keep wondering: the two state senators who wrote the bill are from the Bay Area (Berkeley and Napa). Might that have anything to do with this particular choice?
But restaurant owners are really giving themselves, and their schemes, away with their reactions. Sure, let’s accept that they’ll have to raise prices to make up for the lack of surcharges. Why do they keep acting like that’s an insurmountable challenge, rather than what it is from the consumer end, which is the exact same amount they’d have paid before the ban? Is it because the owners were actually keeping the cash from the surcharges? I’m gonna say yes.
Also one restaurateur called the ban “terrifying.” That’s so embarrassing.
Anyway, ban junk fees everywhere, and let journalists push back when interviewees say ridiculous stuff.
Since we’re talking about spending … we should be allowed to use cash.
I recently noticed that people often use “hibachi” and “teppanyaki” interchangeably, especially when talking about Benihana-style restaurants where diners sit at the griddle and the cook puts on a show with onion towers and flying ingredients. Technically, that is teppanyaki.
A hibachi is a type of small grill and teppanyaki is both a flat griddle and a genre of Japanese food. (Or Japanese American food, but Japanese American food is a genre of Japanese food, so that might be redundant.) I think there’s an editing error in Benihana’s explanation of the difference between hibachi and teppanyaki, but confusion reflects the history of the words being used in place of each other in the U.S. since at least the 1960s.
The first English-language newspaper mention of hibachi I found is from 1864, where it describes a fire started by the charcoal brazier. Most subsequent mentions of hibachi in the 1800s are along the same lines.
I don’t really believe that teppanyaki shows up in U.S. newspapers for the first time exactly 100 years after hibachi (1940s seems more logical), but the above is the earliest I found, and we are immediately off to the races with conflating hibachi and teppanyaki.
Where the terms are separated, you’ll see teppanyaki used in restaurant ads, as seen above, and hibachi in home cooking content. But Substack says I need to wrap it up, so more next week!
A dish I had absolutely never heard of before.
Related Episode: Diversity in Native American Food with Loretta Barrett Oden
Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine
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