Is this Bellevue tempura hot spot worth the hype?

You’ve got to hand it to Bellevue for the way the city has recruited big names in the restaurant world lately: the vegetarian cafe Mavalli Tiffin Rooms from India. Korean restaurant Daeho Kalbijjim from San Francisco. The dim sum palace Sun Sui Wah from up north in Richmond, B.C. And this fall, Peruvian haute cuisine restaurant La Mar Cocina Peruana will join the ranks when it opens downtown.

Each restaurant debut has drawn long lines. But none of them has generated as much hype as the opening of Tendon Kohaku.

In June, this Tokyo-based chain made its American debut near Bellevue Square. (There are a dozen other branches worldwide, in Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Canada.) The restaurant concept revolves mostly around deep-fried seafood and veggies that get served with rice. People waited up to five hours for a table, with diners commuting from as far as Everett and the Tacoma area.

It might seem odd to wait in line for fried food. But Tendon Kohaku approaches the practice of tempura frying as high art, not like a fast food chain peddling junk food. Still, is this tempura worth stewing in line for hours?

While Tendon Kohaku is good, it’s not revelatory enough to merit a wait longer than the runtime of a summer blockbuster. And nearly two months after opening, the restaurant still struggles to be consistent with its deep-fried dishes. That’s a problem, considering that frying is Tendon Kohaku’s raison d’être.

But for all its flaws, Tendon Kohaku also composes intriguing udon and katsu dishes that have kept me, and its large fan base, coming back for more.

As for the tempura, the most compelling deep-fried ingredient at Tendon Kohaku is a runny egg encased in a craggy cocoon of tempura. When done well, the result is a yolk that runs like lava, or perhaps warmed soft cheese. Otherwise, you can request shrimp, chicken, shiitake mushroom and a dozen other seafood and veggies to be deep-fried.

But just because you can throw anything into a deep fryer doesn’t mean you should. The crab sticks, for instance, contained so much moisture that no deep-frying sorcery could salvage them from sogginess.

Tendon Kohaku’s menu depends on its chef’s ability to fry seafood and vegetables so that they stay crispy for 20 minutes after they’ve been coated in a secret medley of flours and plunged into the hot oil. On multiple visits, though, the tempura plopped on my table was inconsistent. Sometimes, it was neither dependably airy nor sufficiently crispy; other times, it was served lukewarm and greasy. The dishes lacked the nutty or roasted notes of sesame oil, which is a signature flavor profile at Tokyo tempura bars.

Some tempura items fare better than others. Seek out the kabocha squash, which balances the savory batter, and the snappy tiger prawns. The flaky fish tempura would reign as one of the Seattle area’s better fish and chips if it came with fries.

Such pieces can be purchased a la carte, but the menu is designed so that you order one of the six specialty bowls, which contain preselected items. The “signature tendon set” tray features several tempura pieces — prawns, chicken breast, squid, crab stick, squash, baby corn, mushroom and beans — with a sticky, salty brown sauce stippled onto the nooks of the surface. The tempura gets served over rice that’s slightly sweet and firm in texture, and the set comes with sides of miso soup, pickled yuzu cabbage and chawanmushi egg custard. All that is reasonably priced for $19.95.

But if you’ve trudged through a long line outside, you should splurge for the $28.95 “premium tendon set,” which features eel and that runny egg along with the aforementioned tempura staples. When the kitchen can coax that batter to its intended crispness, this is one of the best rice bowls you can get around the Sound.

Not every combo worked, though. In the surf-and-turf bowl ($26.95), the aggressively seasoned skirt steak annihilated the delicate tempura.

Meanwhile, the rest of the menu of noodles and seafood is far more interesting.

If the server announces that the kitchen has uni (sea urchin gonads) flown in from Japan, order that with the mentaiko udon, a dish imbued with what the Japanese call “the fifth sense of taste”: umami.

This creamy, rich dish is essentially a canvas to showcase nori seaweed and other Japanese umami. The udon, as pink as cotton candy, tastes modestly of the sea until you bite into the cod and salmon roes — then the ocean crashes into your mouth like a wave.

Also stellar is the salmon katsu, which features slices of king salmon sheathed in a panko-coated crust to contrast with the fatty flesh. With much tableside theatrics, the server whips a runny egg with tartar sauce to pour over the fish and then sprinkles salmon roe on top. This egg-on-egg topping over salmon is served with rice, cabbage and cubes of avocado and tomato. It’s a cornucopia of different textures.

The restaurant’s signature curry, served with the stellar Kurobuta pork katsu, holds the potential to be excellent but currently is a work in progress. It was too salty on one visit, then creamy but out of balance the next. It was a tad like a Oaxacan mole when the restaurant first opened, then resembled a Sri Lankan black curry a month later. I wonder what country it will whisk me to on my next visit.

The restaurant itself has 76 seats spread over two dining rooms. You’ll want to dine in one of the five private booths in the back, where the vibe has the calmness of a spa. That front open-floor seating can be as chaotic as the floor of the stock exchange.

At a time when restaurants are facing a labor shortage, customer service has been lacking at many Seattle-area restaurants lately. That’s not the case here. The waiters seemed trained in Japanese precision and sensibility. They’re exacting in their descriptions of dishes and attuned to the needs of each party. No matter how many dishes I ordered, the waitstaff still got me out the door in an hour, which is a goal for management as it churns through its epic waitlist.

The good news is that those five-hour wait times appear to be in the past, especially since Tendon Kohaku has started to open daily instead of six days a week. Twice in recent weeks, I arrived 30 minutes before doors opened on a weekday and was seated immediately. The wait time should be even shorter if you give it another month or so.

Until then, no: Tendon Kohaku’s tempura isn’t worth a five-hour wait. But it’s an interesting concept that’s worth checking out, even if you wait for the buzz to settle down.