Do not be misled. Despite the "royal steak house" name, this place (10935 North Wolfe Road, 408-257-3688) is not a plush and dimly-lit local competitor of Morton's for the scotch-drinking, cigar-chomping crowd. This is actually a Taiwanese place, and is basically the exact same thing as the old Kingswood, but under different management (and hence a peculiar, but new, name). And when I say the same, it's almost literally the same, with the same split teppanyaki vs hot pot layout and little or no refurbishment done. Today, we went for the teppanyaki instead, having had favorably buttery memories from a number of years ago.
And what a mistake that was. I don't know if I could find anything I liked here (maybe the ginger salad dressing at best?). Not even counting the lukewarm bowl of soup they gave us, the meal was off to a wrong start when he gave me my calamari, which I was expecting in thick steaklike pieces and merely seasoned with a simple pinch of salt and oil. Instead, these were cut into little shriveled pieces sitting in a rather appallingly gooey sauce with chunks of canned pineapple (!) in it...ugh! The worst part about it was that even after eating that, the sauce was leftover on my plate, and each subsequent item was thrown onto my plate and then (intentionally or unintentionally) getting caught up in some of the sauce, be it the boring zucchini and onion veggies or the cubes of NY steak that were also slathered in some other Taiwanese black pepper sauce (which was surprisingly spicy BTW, but by that point in the meal, I had given up already). The fried rice option also had little or none of that rich buttery taste that I remembered either (he barely even touched his mound of butter throughout the whole meal).
And yes, as is par for the course for "teppanyaki" places like Benihana, this was more like a circus act than anything culinary, where the chef starts out with a bunch of unnecessary saber-rattling and noise-making that I felt like such a tourist or suburbanite. I could almost hear the ringleader now: "Ladies and gentlemen, step right up and turn your attention to the center ring, where the amazing Mr. Chef will now amaze and astound you by constructing a little volcano out of concentric rings of an onion piled onto each other and filling it with oil and alcohol before setting it ablaze with a match and banging away on the countertop again to make unnecessary noise and to try to gain your attention and distract you from the bad-tasting food!" (as "oohs" and "aaahs" come from the audience...the only thing missing is a souvenir stand now). OK, sure I knew that this lame performance would be coming, but I was willing to ignore it as long as the food was good. It was not. They even brought out some strange coffee-flavored jello for dessert...and guess what? It had rainbow sprinkles on it. Can someone please drown me further into this nightmare? I rather wanted to puke after the end of all of this, both figuratively and literally.
I don't think that this really had anything to do with the change of ownership, but rather just that this place already changed from the tasty one that I'd remembered from years ago. You'd also think that I would have learned from other Taiwanese teppanyaki experiences, but I guess not. Perhaps I can still find one matching my good memories in Taiwan instead, but I'm no longer going to make an effort to try. This is one meal that gets filed into the "bad food" folder, and flushed down the toilet of one's memory banks. Maybe the hot pot side of the restaurant could still have a chance, but the teppanyaki part is definitely something to avoid next time.
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