Good meals become great when paired with a perfect complementary cocktail. Just like every item on our menu, we strive to deliver excellence with rich textures and bold flavors on our signature drink list. At Benihana, we’re proud to offer a variety of distinct cocktails, all boasting one-of-a-kind flavor profiles and tasting notes.
Rest assured, Benihana’s signature drinks aren’t your normal, everyday concoctions. We separate ourselves from those average cocktail offerings by incorporating traditional Japanese ingredients like yuzu, plum liqueurs and sake, all of which help to create new flavor dimensions for those looking to explore innovative drink options.
When researching potential new cocktails to add to our Benihana menu, our experts pull ideas from current drink trends while stirring in notes of Japanese flair that complement the cocktail’s traditional style. Drinks like our popular Benihana Mojito or Tokyo Mule incorporate customary chilled sake and other Asian-inspired add-ins to bring the flavors to an unexplored level for most of our customers.
Additionally, our mixology team always ensures the new drinks are balanced—too sweet and your palate gets tired, too strong and many find the drink unpleasant and, therefore, undrinkable. Benihana strives to continue adding fresher and overall better ingredients to our program, guaranteeing that our customers will actually want to order a second cocktail instead of giving up halfway through the first.
If you’d like to experiment with mixology at home but don’t know where to start, here’s my main piece of advice: start simple! Take your classic cocktail and modify one ingredient at a time. Go-tos like margaritas and mojitos are easy to personalize by stirring in fun alterations. Add fresh ginger to pull in Asian flavor undertones or mash in passion fruit for a more tropical flair. Whiskey drinks can be more difficult to balance due to their spice characteristics, so playing around with bitters instead of fresh fruits or syrups is better for your taste buds.
