Yesterday, we ate in fear

Yesterday, we ate in fear.

The Tokyo Japanese Steak House has what we deem as a bad policy: if you share your meal, it costs an additional $6. My wife and I typically will each buy an entree for ourselves, and share them with our kids. Partly this is because they give you a lot of food, and partly because our kids eat like squirrels.

So what gives with this policy? Heck if we know. The heck if the waitress knows either. We asked if it meant that it would cost an extra $6 to buy soup and salad to share with our children. Her non-answer answer was that a) the manager wasn't around and b) it depended on if we ordered something else.

If the manager wasn't around, wouldn't that mean the waitress would side with us because the policy didn't make sense? Nope.

So when my wife said we could order a sushi, her eyes lit up and said we could waive the policy and share our food. The result is that the restaurant still extorted us out of $6 (it's the principle that matters).  Plus, we found out they automatically charged 18% gratuity. The final blow? They only served dinner, which was twice as much as lunch prices.

Actually, the best is yet to come. The manager DID finally come, and he looked very intently at our tabled and whispered to our waitress.

My daughter ate in fear. She wanted to escape the restaurant, feeling guilty when we shared our food with her. Who knew if the manager was going to impose the "share" fee anyway ($6/kid for 2 kids is $12)?

After 2+ hours -- the waitress disappeared in 20-25 minute increments -- we finally escaped.

The food (hibachi-grilled veggies and chicken and spicy tuna sushu) was excellent and our chef was a lot of fun, but have policies that treat your customers with dignity.

For 2 hibachi "lunches" and 1 sushi, it cost us $51. (We took 6 Andes mints from the counter.)