They're really more scared of you, than you are of them.

The Ninja Restaurant was decent, but my recommendation is eat in the Ninja Village (reservation required) area, not the rock garden. The ninja village isn't at all compartmentalized like it seems in the pictures. It's open and each table is its own "house". That whole area feels a lot like that cool first level of Tenchu, and the waiters were constantly screwing with the guests as we were ushered through. The rock garden feels like the cramped back room. It was swank enough, but we clearly had the B crew. The ninjas working there were giggly pothead college kids who mostly kept to the kitchen. No one dropped from the ceiling. No one ambushed us at all aside from when we first got off the elevator. It felt kind of isolated, especially since we could hear all the merriment going on in the other section.

The food was the biggest disappointment. I was expecting outlandishly obscure Japanese dishes. The "courses" are very imaginatively described for what they actually are. One of Caitlin's courses was just fried fish on a plate of clam chowder. My main course was garlic flavored prime sirloin tips and it was horrible. I ended up scraping all this bitter puke-garlic off the meat and muscling the rest down. The rest of the dinner was decent Japanese-US fusion. Nothing amazing or even great, but then I didn't order the "Hanzou" - a 5 course gluttony fest including a whole maine lobster, followed by pan fried lamb, followed by a T-bone steak.

I guess I can't blame the wait-staff for not screwing with us more. We probably looked like we wanted some privacy, and they did go after the kids at the next table a lot. They ate it all up. There was a rock wall between us and that table, but we caught glimpses of spinning forks and bursts of flame from around the corner as staff came by to do "ninja magic". Unfortunately, we didn't get anything nearly as cool. To finish off our expensive yawn, some guy did card and nerf ball tricks for us. He was pretty good, and gave us enough explanation to let us know that he was using incredibly fast slight of hand. This brought up an odd question. Do you tip your Ninja Magician?