Joe Kline / The Bulletin Chef Jack Chen starts a big flame while cooking at a hibachi grill for guests at Okawa Steak House & Sushi in Bend.

More than six years have passed since Central Oregon last had a Japanese-style, teppanyaki steak house. And while Shoji’s, which operated on Bend’s north side, had its merits, it was far from the best of the genre.

Now there’s Okawa Steak House & Sushi, which opened Sept. 1 after eight months of renovation of the former Outback Steakhouse location, on Southeast Third Street at Reed Market Road in Bend.

Mickey Lin, owner of Okawa with sushi-chef partner Alex Jiang, is not Japanese. He was born in China and moved to Boise, Idaho, with his parents at the age of 15. But his first Okawa Steak House, in the San Diego suburb of Santee, was met with such success that he began plotting a return to the Pacific Northwest more than a year ago. Other destinations may follow.

There are a lot of good things to say about Okawa, a name that means “big river.”

Without a doubt, the long weeks of renovation have made this a beautiful room, with separate sections for hibachi dining (10 nine-top grills), sushi bar and individual tables. Mostly, I think the offerings from the hibachi grill are excellent, especially when served by an entertaining chef. And the sushi is fresh and flavorful.

But there are shortcomings: Service on my three visits was inconsistent, ranging from outstanding at one meal to largely absent on another.

Salads and soups were disappointing. There’s no brown rice available (the choice is between white and fried); chopsticks are dispensed only on request; and the wine list is sad indeed, placing pinot noir with merlots and pinot gris with chardonnays.

Hibachi dinner

My companion and I did enjoy our teppanyaki (literally, “iron-plate fried”) dinner. We sat around a large hibachi grill with three other couples as a talented chef amused us not only with his knife work and cooking skills but also with sound effects and a playful demeanor (best exhibited by tossing shrimp into open mouths from several feet away). Chefs at other tables were not nearly so entertaining as ours.

We ordered an “Okawa Special for Two,” which featured chicken, shrimp and New York steak for $45.95, a little under $23 apiece. Other choices included salmon, scallops, lobster, calamari and filet mignon. That meal included soup, salad, noodles, vegetables and steamed rice.

Even with all that food, we had begun with an appetizer, a poki salad that was decidedly more salad than poki. Wakame seaweed dominated the marinated, Hawaiian-style chopped tuna, mixed with octopus, red onions, sea beans and other seaweeds and served with a sweet chile sauce. It was good, but not what we expected.

Bowls of hibachi soup were no tastier than hot water with a little chicken broth added. There was no substance except single, thin slices of mushroom and a tiny taste of fried onion. And the house salad was made of crunchy but tasteless iceberg lettuce, topped with Asian ginger dressing and a tiny amount of red cabbage, carrot, cucumber and tomato. We pushed both plates aside after small tastes, and eventually hailed a busser to remove them from our seating area.

The main courses were excellent. Steak and shrimp were perfectly done, and the chicken was only slightly overcooked. Served with ginger and seafood sauces, as well as veggies, noodles and rice, we loved everything except for absent service at bill-paying time. When we did get our check, it was hard to find someone to take our money.

Sushi and bento

We returned on a subsequent occasion and sat at the sushi bar, where we shared a sushi-and-sashimi combo that included salmon, maguro and hamachi tunas, albacore, mackerel, escolar, scallops and octopus, both as nigiri (on rice, wrapped in nori seaweed) and as raw sashimi.

A spicy tuna roll was not as tasty as the Bend Roll recommended by one of the servers. Spicy salmon and mango were rolled with rice inside the nori, while seared salmon, avocado, scallions and masago (smelt eggs) covered the outside. A tangy sauce was good, but the standard sushi blend of wasabi mustard and soy sauce was even better.

My midday solo visit for a chicken-teriyaki bento lunch had significant pros and cons. The teriyaki itself fell somewhere in the middle, as the portion was small, the sauce mild and unremarkable. A bowl of miso soup was very good, quite unlike the hibachi soup, and a basic California roll, without raw fish, was better than average.

The house salad, though, was that same insipid iceberg mix I’d had before. And a side serving of three shumai was absolutely dreadful. Normally served as steamed, savory dim sum stuffed with pork and shrimp, these shumai tasted as though they had just been thawed and fried.

There are several good sushi bars in this area, but to my mind, Bend has but two truly authentic Japanese restaurants, both of them simple and tiny. Both the Juno Japanese Sushi Garden, off Century Drive, and Bend-O Bento Japanese Kitchen, on Wilson Avenue, concentrate on specialties — sushi and bento — and neither can offer teppanyaki specialties.

Okawa has found its corner of the Central Oregon market.

— John Gottberg Anderson can be reached at janderson@bendbulletin.com.