Cheap and yet expensive

If I could give 0 stars, I would.

Last night I went to the Sanlitun Village location with a group of friends for a birthday celebration. It was our first time at the Tairyo, and my first time at Tairyo in general. However, I am not new to teppanyaki and given that I have actually been to several Benihana locations I can attest that Tairyo is far from deserving the title: "the Benihana of Beijing". Let me illustrate why before I get into the argument I had with the manager.

1. Benihana teppanyaki is a "performance", where the chefs can do more than just stir-fry food. At Benihana's the chefs can flick food into the customer's mouth, flip food around like an air dance performance, and truly entertain the customers infront of them.

The chef at Tairyo (SLT) not only failed to deliver good customer service, but was not able to attract our interest in his cooking skills (or lack of). I did not see any difference between the Tairyo "chef" and a street peddler heating sausages on a hot plate.

2. Benihana tastes better. The ingredients they use, such as their butter, is obviously of higher quality. This is evident from the inferior fried rice at Tairyo.

Now that I've gotten that comparison out of the way, I want to describe the issues I had with the SLT Tairyo:

First of all, half of the things we had ordered never arrived. I spent the entire evening calling waittresses and reminding them what has not been brought to the table. They had a cute iPad mini for orders, but they had no idea what had been delivered and what was still being made (and what had been forgotten). When I would remind them of the items that I had previously ordered, they would suddenly be "out of stock" (each time a different item), even though no one had bothered to tell me these things the first time we had ordered. Given that customer service in China tends to suck, I didn't think much of this at first, but simply made additional orders and kept on reminding them.

By the third reminder, however, I was getting a little upset. One of our party members arrived significantly later than us, so by the time he had arrived we were already ready for dessert. Nevertheless, he is a paying customer (also buffet) and he wanted to order food for himself. One of the dishes he had ordered was ebi prawns, which in the picture is a full plate with at least 6-7 on the plate, but when it arrived there were only two. I asked them to deliver the rest of them as we never specified how many prawns we wanted and therefore it is unreasonable to assume that my friend can only eat two of them (my husband could eat two plates of them). They brought them over, I complained once again about the second fried rice we had ordered that had never arrived, and then the chef refused to cook the prawns. He conducted an interview, asking every member of our party if they wanted prawns. Then he said that if we don't want prawns he's not going to cook all of them! My friend assured him, up to three times, that he would eat them alone if he had to because he's the one who ordered them and he's hardly had any food to eat so far. Finally, the chef cooks the prawns, but after my friend had eaten two of the prawns he determined that they were not fresh and even had a poor aftertaste (so he put them aside and continued with his dinner).

Meanwhile I was still very upset about the various dishes they had failed to bring, and the pace at which they were dropping some of them. Thus, when we were prompted to pay the bill (prior to closing time too) I exclaimed that I would not leave until everything I have ordered is delivered. The manager came and interrogated us on the ebi prawns, saying that we were being wasteful because they cost 5-6 rmb a piece. She brought out the menu and claimed that there was a disclaimer/warning there about wasting food (which was not in English, by the way), and that if we do not eat all the prawns we would have to pay an additional ala carte fee for it. This was beyond ridiculous! We are paying 238 RMB for all-you-can-eat, but the servers did not bring us the food we had ordered, the chef had refused to cook the food we had ordered, and now we're being told that we have to finish the less-than-fresh (and not at all delicious) prawns or else we have to pay an additional fee?--Simply unacceptable. We shut down this topic soon enough, but various other things that other members of my party had failed to eat were pointed out to me, and I actually had to tell the manager that "what you're saying is that even if your food is not good I'm still required to eat it?"

In the end, we got SOME of the dishes we had ordered (still not all), the manager and I struck a deal on which would be delivered (though even that deal was not upheld on her part), and most of my party had to leave for the next location because they felt so uncomfortable under the glares and whispers of the restaurant staff. We, of course, stayed till the end and finished most of what we had ordered.

Tairyo, for me, was an entirely negative experience, which I hope did not mar my friend's birthday celebration.