Kobe Restaurant- Tokyo Chic Meets Wal-Mart Parking Lot

Kobe Restaurant....One of the finest restaurant decor in Columbus happens to be housed in a place located in a Super -Wal Mart Strip Center. Located in a former Cooker restaurant, Kobe Restaurant delivers average Japanese steakhouse hibachi food with moderate to expensive prices. Walking into the newly renovated restaurant, I was taken aback by the Miami-esque outdoor lounge just off the front entrance. The comfy lounge chairs with the white fabric drapes and umbrellas surrounded stone fireplace where diners could gather The foyer with a glass waterfall in the background looked like the entryway of any contemporary American restaurant found in any major city. Overall, the look was clean and captivating with just enough touches of stainless steel decor. From the paper lantern art hanging from the ceilings to the bamboo wood walls, no detail was left unattended.
Dinner selections ranged from the normal hibachi fare of steak, chicken and seafood, all cooked by a knife skilled chef/entertainer/jokester. Each dinner entree included chicken broth soup accented with onions, house salad of iceberg lettuce and creamy miso dressing, a shrimp appetizer, hibachi vegatables and your choice of steamed or fried rice.
We started off with the Kobe spring rolls-- hot, crispy and delicious filled with hot pork and yseafood filling. The dipping sauce, accented with chilli peppers hot a nice combination of sweet and heat. We continued the fried fiesta with a sampling of vegetable tempura, a healthy helping of nicely fried vegetables beautifully arranged in bouquet like fashion. The tempura was light and crispy and covered with Panko breadcrumbs, an ingredient usually only found on shrimp tempura and not vegetable tempura.
For my dinner, I chose the ribeye steak hibachi dinner with fried rice. The hibachi show started and our newly trained chef [who claimed to have studied the art of stir-frying for 3 months] started the shrimp appetizer demostration by skillfully cutting off all the tails of the shrimp in record time and flipping all the remains into his chest pocket of his chef's coat. As he finished the shrimp appetizer, he moved onto the vegetables and meat, expertly flambing the vegetables in the process for a more grand show.
Overall, the ribeye was well cooked and flavorful... really made possible by the trio of dipping sauces that included a soy ginger sauce, a sweet miso sauce, and another sauce that tasted like diluted barbeque sauce. Overall, the food was filling and tasty but similar to any food that you would get in any hibachi restaurant in the midwest.
In light of the decent food, Kobe restaurant had great attendance for a Wednesday night with 8 tables of 6 people each filling the restaurant.

Kobe Restaurant
3884 Morse Rd
428-8880

Ratings (1 to 5 worst to best)
Decor- 5 globes
Service- 4 globes
Food- 3 globes
Repeat offender? -- only if I'm in the area and have a hankering of eating habachi food and smelling like it after.