Benihana is famous for introducing the United states to the teppanyaki (AKA hibachi) concept, where food is cooked on a giant flat iron griddle while guests look on in wonder. Quite often, the cooks will turn their food-making into a performance, juggling spatulas and doing comedy routines and whatnot. It’s all very entertaining. The first Benihana restaurant opened in 1964, and the rest, as they say, is history.
However, if you love Benihana’s food but you want to skip the pageantry (and the prices), you can pick up one of their frozen meals. We’ve been curious about the frozen version of their food for a while now, and today we’re finally digging into their frozen line. We’re starting with the Benihana Yakisoba Chicken.
This is easy enough to cook. Simply pop the tray into the microwave for two minutes, give it a quick stir (or “flip noodle nest,” as the instructions so eloquently put it), and pop it back in for about 90 seconds longer. No spatula juggling required! (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the box, check out our package scans at the bottom of this review.)
This comes out of the microwave smelling amazing. This is largely because of the yakisoba sauce, which is somehow both rich and subtle at the same time. What we mean by this is that it’s rich enough to never taste bland, and it permeates every last bite of the meal. On the other hand, it never overpowers the other ingredients — even the flavor of the noodles comes through. It’s a great balance for a sauce to strike!
The chicken is absurdly good. We wish all frozen chicken could be like this! It’s soft to the point where it breaks apart in your mouth, but it’s not mushy or soggy. It’s a combination of rib and breast meat, so some pieces are more flavorful than others, but it’s still a great balance. Plus, it soaks up the perfect amount of sauce to give it just a little bit of saucy oomph.
There are some veggies mixed in as well. The carrots are ridiculously flavorful, and the zucchini is soft with a bit of crunch. The onions are there to enhance the flavor, but they are cut a little bit large for our personal tastes.
The noodles are mostly alright, though ours ended up a little dry in places. We admit, however, that we might not have sufficiently “flipped the noodle nest,” so this might be our fault. As far as flavor, we have no complaints. As we mentioned earlier, the flavor of the noodles comes through the yakisoba sauce.
This isn’t exactly a diet-friendly food, but we assume you weren’t expecting it to be. This contains 420 calories and 1,280 mg of sodium. While that calorie count isn’t terrible, the sodium level is really high. Then again, the sodium content in a meal at a Benihana restaurant is going to be quite high as well.
The Benihana Yakisoba Chicken is definitely one of the better frozen Asian-style meals we’ve tried here at Freezer Meal Frenzy. No, this isn’t going to match up with an actual restaurant meal, and you certainly won’t get the show if you skip the restaurant experience (though nothing’s stopping you from doing a bit of comedy for your family while you microwave this). Still, as the frozen version of a restaurant meal, this holds up surprisingly well.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen meal, check out our package scans below.
