Umami

Located at 3123 Garden Road in Burlington, Umami offers Japanese cuisine for lunch and dinner seven days a week. There are happy hour specials from 4:30-7:30 Monday-Wednesday as well as rotating food specials. Beer, wine, and sake are available.

Teppanyaki-style Japanese steakhouses, at least in this area of North Carolina, imply a tradeoff: you will pay a bit more than you think you should and eat shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers in exchange for watching food get diced before your eyes and set on fire. Even with this give-and-take firmly in mind, Umami walks a very thin line between delicious and disaster.

Some restaurants of this ilk aim for bright lighting, soothing music, and classy décor, but Umami has opted for a more accessible downmarket approach. The dark red walls are not unsightly, but the low lighting and the hip hop playing in the background run counter to expectations. The restaurant is divided into a sushi side and a teppanyaki side. Should you opt for the latter, you’ll find several tables each arranged around grills, each with its own wisecracking cook. Again, not necessarily a bad thing, but a firmly “family friendly” approach.

While Umami’s pricing (hibachi dinners starting in the mid-teens on up) is in line with competitors, it’s likely a better value: you get a lot of food for your money. My chicken, steak, and shrimp special ran $20 while my wife’s steak and chicken was slightly less. Both meals came with salad, soup, vegetables, rice, noodles, and sauce in plentiful portions.

The food offered more hits than misses. Though the salad was simple and its accompanying ginger dressing paste-like, it tasted better than it looked. The chicken-flavored broth is no substitute for miso but not bad in its own right. Our cook proved to be as good a culinary hand as he was a corny joke-teller: the vegetables were nicely cut, the chicken coated in a tasty teriyaki sauce, and the cooked-to-order steak was thankfully tender.

Our server/hostess was polite and left us with no room for complaint. Not so the couple beside us, however, whose hibachi order was forgotten (a problem quickly remedied) and whose request to add cream cheese to a sushi order resulted in dollops of the stuff placed atop (rather than inside of) a roll.  

All told, Umami offered a lot (definite leftovers) of fairly tasty food for the money charged, but its various quirks call a return into question.

7.25/10