Sizzling dish not so hot
By Stephanie Bertholdo  bertholdo@theacorn.com

Yamato restaurant's popular "onion volcano" is under fire.

Oil spewed from one of the teppanyaki-style cooking presentations at the Agoura Hills Japanese restaurant Feb. 26 and reportedly caused second-degree burns to a patron.

The woman, whose name was not released by the Los Angeles County Fire Department, was treated at Los Robles Hospital and Medical Center in Thousand Oaks.

The teppanyaki presentation calls for patrons to sit around a tabletop grill while a chef prepares their food in front of them.

The burns to the woman's face and hair were allegedly caused when a chef doused one of the restaurant's favorite onion appetizers with oil and lit it on fire as part of a showy presentation.

When the lid fell off the oil jar, "the oil kind of went in her direction, and she got burned from that," said Brett Meehan of the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

The release of too much fuel caused a "big flare-up," said Capt. Wayne Miller of the fire department.

When the paramedics arrived at the restaurant on Roadside Drive, the woman was being treated for her burns, Miller said.

Because of the incident, Yamato manager J.J. Jaemdung said the restaurant has turned the fire show into a steamy demonstration instead.

Rather than use oil and fire, the onion is now steamed to create the volcano effect. The fire that used to rise out of the onion dish like a volcano has been replaced with a show of steam rising from the layers of onions, he said.

Jaemdung declined further comment about the incident.

Several patrons were left shaken by the news.

"It was very frightening to hear that story as our little girls sat at the same table where this had happened only two nights earlier," local resident Amy Yoffe told The Acorn.

The Agoura Hills Yamato restaurant opened in 1998.