For its third fiscal quarter, total company revenues increased to $50.1 million, compared with $47 million in the corresponding year ago period, a gain of 6.6%. "Factors that entered into the restaurants' operating performance are an economy that's steadily improving, a restaurant price increase that was well received by our customers, and restaurant costs and expenses that were well behaved, including commodity costs," said Michael R. Burris, Benihana CFO, during the company's third-quarter earnings conference call on Tuesday. "The good economy benefits all our operations, but particularly our teppanyaki business."

Burris added that the company's still-new Emperor's Club frequent-dinners' program, which Benihana launched in mid-2004, seems to be having the desired effect. "The goal of the program is to increase the average return rates, and anecdotal evidence suggests that it has done that," he said. "The data set isn't large enough to determine with certainty an increase in return rates, but we believe the program will prove successful."

During the quarter, one of the chain's teppanyaki restaurants in San Francisco was reopened after undergoing extensive remodeling, and another in Manhasset, NY, which closed in the second quarter, reopened last week. New Benihana teppanyaki restaurants are currently under development in Miramar and Coral Gables, FL. New units of RA Sushi are development in Houston and Huntington Beach, CA, and Haru's new unit in the Gramercy Park area of New York City is expected to open later this month, followed a few weeks later by the new Haru in the Old Town area of Philadelphia, that chain's first restaurant outside New York.