Sawtelle Boulevard

Several generations younger, more urbane and worldly, the Chuzai-in took their Calvin Klein–clothed kids to the Tokyo-based Kumon Math learning center and Hello Kitty/Sanrio toy store in the mall. They loved Mousse Fantasy, a pricey Franco-Japonaise lunchroom and pastry shop. Its feather-light pastries, California esque salads and spaghetti omelets are a typical distillation of Eastern and Western sensibilities. By then such foods were conventional in Japan, but appeared the epitome of avant-garde in L.A.

The mall’s new NijiyaJapanese "deli" and market also figured nicely into the Chuzai-in lifestyle. Standing in front of its bento-box takeout area or the coolers holding ready-cut sashimi, yogurts and coffee Jell-O in plastic cups, you can easily imagine you’re in a supermarket back in Japan. The epitome of Western-inflected food trends of the postwar era, the food at Nijiya and Mousse Fantasy must have mystified the older Issei who’d lost contact with their homeland decades before. The Chuzai-in’s presence wasn’t altogether welcomed by those who distrusted flashier ways.

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Asahi Ramen

2027 Sawtelle Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90025

Category: Restaurant > Asian

Region: West L.A.

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More About

• Asahi Ramen
• Sachiko Ota
• Gardena
• Eating Out
• Japanese Food and Cooking

But this was a new era, and the Chuzai-in’s tastes would shortly transform the face of Japanese food and restaurants in L.A. Westerners would discover how to eat izaka-ya style, in restaurants like Place Foods Bar, an elegant, much-favored Chuzai-in watering hole that used to be Yuu, on Santa Monica Boulevard. It’s in spots like this that VIP’s kampai over business deals. Expensive cognacs, fine wines and several dozen rare sakes (along with inexpensive ones) line its walls, and the chefs turn out a succession of small, exotic plates, tapas-style, to go with them. Place does make a few concessions. (This isn’t, after all, Tokyo.) It serves ice cream sundaes topped with mounds of whipped cream and, hedging its bets, several teriyaki dinner combos.

More casual izaka-ya, such as Furaibo, attract young Shin Issei families, and boisterous groups of college kids who down rounds of shochu (a working-class drink of distilled barley, rice or sweet potato). Furaibo’s little dishes may be yakitori or whole deep-fried baby halibut, but everyone orders the house specialty — deep-fried tebasaki chicken.

Nanban Kan

, a yakitori bar that opened in 1978 around the corner from Sawtelle, introduced West L.A. to Japan’s preoccupation with specialty restaurants. Whether with the definitive noodles or the ultimate whale-meat dinner, attaining perfection is the goal of such restaurants. At first, non-Japanese didn’t get the idea of a whole meal of skewered and grilled mini-kebabs ordered à la carte while sitting in front of a coal-fueled barbecue. But the observant realized that the chef had limited his menu to focus on his timing at the grill. The sushi movement helped transition the uninitiated to this eating style, so when Yakitori-Yaopened on Sawtelle in 1997, one could expect a wait for dinner. Yakitori-Ya catered less to the shirt-and-tie business crowd than it did to the trend-obsessed Roppongi youth jet set.

The Sawtelle neighborhood became more Tokyoized, inevitably bringing more specialty restaurants, including clones of the noodle shops so dear to the Japanese. About a dozen years after Nanbankan opened, Yasuhiro and Noriko Fukada introduced the Westside to udon and soba. Almost the moment Mishima opened its doors in 1992, it was standing-room-only on the patio, where noodle lovers lined up for a seat. Stashed away upstairs in the corner of a gaudy, multilevel mini-mall, designed and decorated with exquisite panache, Mishima had the perfect persona for teaching Westside diners how to slurp their tanuki or wakame udon.

Mishima remains with new mana-gers, as it is a Japanese franchise. But the Fukadas have opened Taiko in Brentwood Gardens. Another Sawtelle noodle parlor, Asahi Ramen, is run by the former wine steward of the famed Okura Hotel in Tokyo, Masao Asahina. Why a ramen shop? I asked him. After 30 years in the restaurant business, in management (Horikawa, and Matsu in Huntington Beach), he’d simply tired of commuting. And Sawtelle was a ramen-deprived area — unthinkable for a Japanese neighborhood. He got a friend and Chinese-restaurant owner to teach him the basics of turning out Asahi’s huge, steaming bowls of angel-hair-fine noodles in a soup heaped with shredded chicken or tempura, and the various other traditional Ramen toppings.

With Japan’s tastes globalizing as fast as its economy, ethnic cusines came into favor, spawning specialty restaurants with a quirky Japanese spin. Sawtelle’s mini-malls are filled with such places, among them Café Muse & Bar, an izakaya offering 18 microbrews, California wines and sake, and international foods on its little plates.

Going further afield, to the land of the Raj, we find the Japanese version of the English version of curry. For anyone whose vision of Japan ends with the beautiful temples of Kyoto, Hurry Curry of Tokyo will seem an anomaly. But curry verges on a national obsession in Japan, and Hurry Curry fills a definite need for the homesick Japanese university students who come to Sawtelle craving chicken-cutlet curry or the supremely un-Indian croquette curry.

Japan’s love affair with French food sparked a genre of Westernized bistros such as Ishi’s Grill, that wildly creative, low-cost Franco-Japanese dive on Beverly Boulevard. Owner Masayuki Ishikawa (who everyone called Ishi) joined forces with Kenji Minamida to open Sawtelle Kitchen. Nowadays, Minamida owns the restaurant, and the food at this charming, almost makeshift place is less Franco and a little more modern-day Japonaise. Grilled-fish dishes swabbed with ponzu, spaghetti with spicy cod roe, and a list of curry dishes — the whole world à la Japonaise. At Restaurant 2117 Sawtelle, another place with Franco-Japanese roots, most offerings are Alice Waters–style Mediterranean. Japanese ingredients do appear in some, but certainly not in every dish, which shows how far away from its beginnings Japanized Western food has come.