Osaka, Hibachi, and performing Asian-ness

One of my good friends just had her birthday dinner at Osaka, a sushi and steakhouse located just across the street from Herrell's in Northampton. The birthday girl chose Osaka primarily because it offers hibachi, a style of meal in which a chef slices, dices, grills, and flambes meat and vegetables in front of the customers' eyes. (According to Wikipedia, the dining style is technically called teppanyaki; the word hibachi refers to a particular type of grill.) We went to the restaurant anticipating a show, and that's exactly what we got. The chef, pictured to the left, lit the grill on fire, twirled his knives and spatulas, tossed eggs into his hat, and even squirted a pretty generous amount of sake into my friend's mouth!

But what really struck me about the dinner wasn't so much the chef's knife skills or culinary prowess, it was his position as a performer, and particularly as an Asian performer. At the beginning of the meal, he emerged from the kitchen banging on utensils and yelling, "Are you ready??" Then, as he set up the grill, he launched into a string of incomprehensible words, which could have been Japanese but could have also been pidgin English. Every time he squirted oil onto the griddle, he announced "baby oil." And whenever he was holding the bottle of sake, he proclaimed, "More sake more happy!" One of his regular pranks involved squirting customers with water out of a rubber toy shaped like a boy urinating. It seemed like he was playing the role of a goon - his performance was full of silliness but devoid of intellectual expression.

I still haven't reached a conclusive interpretation of the hibachi performance, but I know that several issues are at stake here. First, race is absolutely salient here. Osaka's patrons anticipate a Japanese restaurant, i.e. an experience of Japanese culture. And, most of the time in Northampton, the Asian chef performs for white patrons. (Our group was actually atypical in that we were almost exclusively Asian-American.) Secondly, performances - whether they take place in a theater or in a restaurant - inevitably influence our understanding of both familiar and unfamiliar groups. And third, the chef performed a number of stereotypically Asian traits, including choppy language (I suspect that his English was more advanced than he let on), and knife skills (reminiscent of how western pop culture fetishizes Oriental martial arts). This isn't unprecedented. When I think of how actors have historically performed Asian-ness, the first film that comes to mind is Breakfast at Tiffany's, and its obnoxiously racist portrayal of the landlord, Mr. Yunioshi (played by white actor Mickey Rooney). With this parallel in mind, I voiced a bit of concern to the friend who organized the party, and he responded that it's just entertainment, and he thinks that it's okay to watch because that's what we're paying for. Out of politeness, I suppressed the instinct to make a snarky response about how people paid money to watch blackface minstrelsy. But it's a conversation I'd like to continue. To what extent do hibachi chefs in the U.S. perform Asian-ness? And how can a restaurant strike a balance in which they expose customers to another culture without essentializing or stereotyping that culture?