Stories retold: Benihana Atlanta Culture Clash

(I'm going to set down, periodically, a few of the stories I seem to keep telling, in the hope that maybe I'll stop boring people with them in person. This is an old one, from many years back. Ed.)

Back in the eighties, I went to a convention in Atlanta, as the lone "headquarters" guy, teamed up with two young saleswomen from a small company we'd just acquired. Like many acquirees, they were nervous about the future, nervous about looking professional in front of the new owners, and so on. Although they were both from the south, neither knew anything about Atlanta, nor did I.

After the show floor closed, we headed out to find dinner, not knowing that downtown Atlanta rolled itself up at 5:00 -- instead of a cosmopolitan set of dining options, the area around the convention center seemed to be mostly emptied-out office buildings. We did, though, find a Benihana nearby and open.

I assume you know what a Benihana restaurant is: a corporate-teppanyaki-style Japanese place, where you sit around large tables, usually with other parties, and a cook prepares a limited set of dishes for you on a grill that's essentially part of the table. It's a kind of dining theatre that's old hat today, but was a more or less new thing in the US, back then.

We got seated, along with a group of self-conscious, dressed-up high school kids, and were talking about the day's work, when -- the drunkest woman in the world was seated with us. I don't know why they even let her in the door, but her state of complete intoxication was immediately apparent to us, her new dining companions. She sat down, looked dazedly around, and said, "Hell, I'm in a damn Chinese restaurant." I'm not going to try to do the dialect, here -- you'll just have to keep in mind that everything this person said was in a deep, deep southern accent, complete with multiple syllables where standard English would use but one; "damn" thus became "day-um."

Next, and before anyone could really absorb the magnitude of our friend's incapacitation, our chef arrived, and unfortunately for him, he was not of the expected ethnicity. In fact, he was South Asian, not Japanese. The drunk stared at him for a minute and then pointed out, "You ain't no Chinaman -- you're an A-rab." Everyone immediately looked away.

There followed a confused few minutes during which the chef tried to explain the menu (which was just a matter of choosing the kind of protein she wanted grilled.) Somehow, he managed to get her to agree that chicken would be OK, although he could probably have gotten her to order mongoose, if he'd wanted to. But as he began to do his knife skills thing, she began to have second thoughts. She turned to me (it was my honor to have the seat next to her) and asked, "They ain't going to kill that chicken right here in front of us, are they?"

"Yes," I said, "and be glad you didn't order beef."

At this point, my memory of the precise sequence of events becomes a bit hazy. I remember the saleswoman seated on my other side elbowing me, not wanting to see me make things any worse than they were (both of my companions were mortified, it later turned out, that their new Yankee owners were seeing such a sordid side of the New South.) And I remember the restaurant staff removing the drunk -- why it took them that long to realize what they had on their hands is baffling. But it remains one of my fondest memories of that innocent time, when things were still a blend of yuppified and stupefied.