Behinana of Tokyo

1. What is the case about?

The case is about Benihana of Tokyo (BOT), a Japanese style steak house restaurant chain and its rise to success in the USA market. The case provides insights on how Rocky (the founder of Benihana, USA) transformed his dream into reality by implementing well thought out restaurant model wherein he integrated Japanese essence with American food style. Other aspects the case included were around Benihana's background, business strategy and expansion, operation model, etc.

Benihana enjoyed a unique niche in the market, with traditional Japanese style restaurant offering American style food. Their main attraction is offering familiar food, high touch customer service and new concept of preparation and serving food. The novel concept of Hibachi table, not only reduced the overheads associated with conventional kitchen but also gave patron an unique food preparation show with unusual amount of attentive service. Few restaurants tried to imitate Benihana's business model but failed miserably.

2. How did Benihana expand its operations?

Benihana of Tokyo created what other Japanese restaurants failed to do so, a fun and entertaining atmosphere with simple middle American menu was an instant hit with the customers. Further their target market location, metropolitan cities with Japanese population, helped them achieve volume business. Even though Rocky was great believer of advertisement and promotion, the initial expansion was a result of huge demand and word of mouth. Nearly, 68% of business generated was from word of mouth and recommendation.

The first Benihana unit were established in New York, followed by second unit in NY and a unit each in Chicago and San Francisco. Subsequently, fifth unit was set up in Las Vegas as a joint venture. By this time, Benihana was cult in the restaurant business, many investors were interested in taking up franchise of BOT. However, franchise model did not worked out.

Few other aspects of BOT expansion are captured in following points:

● BOT Primary target market were tier 1 cities in the US. However, they wanted to enter tier 2 cities with business potential.

● BOT also wanted to leverage its business in its native country Japan and other countries such as Mexico, Canada, UK, etc.

● Exploring Joint ventures with the hotel chains such as Hillton

● Plans to enter processed food products for retail sales

● Plans to start quick service joints 'Orient Express' to target younger generation.

3. In the words of Russ