Will You Be Having the Flying Knives With Your Entree?

When the prudent diner walks into one of these fine Japanese steakhouses featuring a chef working over a superheated grill fitted into the dining table itself, and flinging knives around in the way of casual entertainment, it is natural for him to scout out the lay of the land.

It’s important to gauge the personality of these fellows and to steer himself, or myself as it turns out to be, and the people with me, to a table I’m comfortable with.

I look first for contusions, bandages, stitches, slings, eye patches, and bruises on the part of the wait staff.

Do they shy away from this or that fellow’s table? Do they cower, shield themselves with an upturned arm, or wait for a break in the action before they walk by?

Is there a vulnerability about them, as you sometimes see in people who have known great and unwelcome surprises in life?

Do they have a haunted look, a look which you might compare to the circus performer who stands beneath an apple balanced on her head and facing a fellow with a handful of sharp objects, hoping for the best but recognizing the reality of the situation?

These and other subtle clues help guide the careful diner.

I say ‘the careful diner,’ but as regards these fine people I usually go out to eat with, caution is not part of their makeup.

If I were to tell them, “look, let’s avoid that one fellow over there in the corner, he seems to be irritated about something; it may be his tax burden, it may be that he hit a pothole on the way to work. Whatever it is, I get a feeling that he may let his mood interfere with his professional responsibilities, and I’d just as soon not be in the way while he is flinging knives around.”

This though is the type of thing that these fine people would like. They, I’m afraid, would consider an accidental knife quivering in the walnut paneling alongside their ear, or let us be honest, quivering alongside my ear, to be a feature, not a bug, of the scenario.

By this point of view this whole quivering knife thing enlivens the evening and gives it color. It makes the night memorable in a way that you just couldn’t get otherwise.

Well, they’re that way.

Others of us though don’t need such surges of external stimulation to feel that we are getting our money’s worth from the evening.

I have enjoyed many a meal, I am tempted to say enjoyed the large majority, even the vast majority, of my meals in life without any cutlery flying around in the air in the least. I have found these to be perfectly satisfactory dining experiences.

But as I say, these others consider it a day poorly spent if it doesn’t include a couple of bank robbery attempts within earshot, a free-fall plunge down an open city manhole narrowly avoided, or a piano crashing down on the pavement from a high window just to the right or to the left of them.

These are the type of everyday events that lift the spirits and sharpen one’s attention, and drive away that drowsy feeling after lunch.

For my part however I avoid chefs with a “Trainee” button on their white coats, and I check others surreptitiously to see if their knifes are held together by twine, gray packing tape, or that white athletic tape that we used to use in piecing our eyeglasses back together when we were young. These seem to raise a red flag with me.

Does he seem happy, this fellow, even exuberantly so? Does he seem to be in love? Does life seem magical to him at this moment?

Uh-oh.

I call these warning signs of the most serious nature.

A man that happy simply expects that things will turn out for the better, no matter how complicated they might get in the meantime.

For instance, ‘complicated’ in the way that errant knives sometimes go north northwest through the air and not south southeast as intended…that kind of complication.

This buoyant individual seems to project an attitude that there’s a certain amount of give and take in the course of a shift – perhaps of the nature of a diner getting brained by a spatula that flies out of his hand – but at the end of the day isn’t love all that we need?

Yes, well.

And this man over here, just now slicing the steak in the air with his whipping knife, he seems to have an ambitious look to me, like an actor seeking to make it on Broadway but who, for the time being, is mired in the services industry.

He feels, my thinking goes, that he has been meant for something more than this. He has pictured a different outcome than standing here before me cooking my meal and cracking jokes. 

Ambition thwarted is a dangerous thing, I say.

Right when you should be thinking about whether you usually fling this knife across the table with your left hand or your right hand, you’re instead thinking of how you can’t wait to get out of this one-horse town and go sing the male lead in West Side Story. This naturally affects your flinging skills.

I don’t know why, but I get the feeling that this other gentleman still, the fellow who has just speared an onion, four mushrooms, and a whole chicken on one skewer as they fell from the sky, is a short timer. In fact, it may be his last day on the job.

Well, you know how we all are on the last day of the job. Your mind is elsewhere. You wonder why you’re even going to the trouble of showing up. What are they going to do, fire you? And what with running back and forth to HR filling out the paperwork and saying goodbye to everyone, things start to slip.

We around the table just hope it is not a knife that starts to slip.

Now, this fellow over here, I like the looks of him.

He has a seasoned look, like one who has known life. He seems skeptical. There is the wariness about him of one who has seen much in this world and has walked away with decidedly mixed feelings about it all.

This is good, this is good.

Such a person moves forward carefully, checks and double checks at every step of the way, knows not to overreach or to try something – say a new knife-tossing move undertaken blindfolded – that is just beyond his abilities.

No, for him, better by far to stay with the tried and true.

Life is uncertain, his demeanor seems to say, life can be unkind, so do not tempt Fate by putting yourself – or others! – in any sort of potential danger.

He, unlike the star-struck lover, has no confidence that things will always work out for the best.

In fact, they usually don’t.

In that case, it’s best to present a low profile to Fate so that he or she, Fate that is, isn’t tempted to sneak up from behind and lay into you with a blackjack just to prove a point.

So I gesture to the hostess and nudge my little group over this fellow’s way. He and I exchange looks as we sit down, and it seems to me that we understand one another. I convey silently that I don’t seek to be excited by this dining occasion, but would be perfectly fine being a bit bored with the proceedings.

Perfectly fine with boredom! Some of us are that way!

As he lays out his knives and instruments with nary a clatter, and peacefully lights the grill with a non-flourish, and sedately sprinkles spices in a manner that any one of us would do and not while the shaker is flying upwards to the ceiling, it strikes me that I may have found the perfect match.