This past Christmas I received a gift card for the ‘Be The Chef‘ experience at Benihana from my brother Charlie. The Be The Chef experience consists of taking a training session at Benihana and then cooking for four guests. Since there isn’t a Benihana in Chicago it’s been a challenge to make this work as it consists of nearly back to back trips out to Wheeling, Illinois.

This past Sunday I went for the training session having really no idea what it would entail. When I called to schedule and asked how long it would take, I was told it depended on how good I cook. Ominous.

The training took about an hour and consisted of me breaking one bowl. The dinner went a little better than the training as you can see in the video. My left shoulder feels like I played in a 32 round air hockey tournament. My trainer Chef Rick was patient to say the least. At one point he ran to the kitchen to get me spare egg.

As you can see from the photograph above Dan was a little worried about my cooking skills but he does have all his fingers in tact.

* This is the waiver I had to sign.
** For the dinner we took the Metra train out to Wheeling and of course accidently boarded the quiet train with a couple of roadies. Union Station at 4:45pm during a weekday is absolutely terrifying. The experience all but seals the deal that I will never move to the suburbs.