Big Fish Story -- Sushi Dan

Sushi Dan

8000 W. Sunset Blvd., #A2020
Los Angeles, CA 90046
(323) 848-8583
Google Info


11056 Ventura Blvd.
Studio City, CA 91604
(818) 985-2254
Google Info


I know the stated purpose of this blog is to identify "cheap ethnic eats," which evokes (as it should) images of holes-in-the-wall in Koreatown, Thaitown, Little Tokyo, and East L.A.. I suppose, Sushi Dan is "ethnic," as mush as the ubiquitous raw fish can be said to be truly Japanese anymore; and true, the lunch special is an extraordinary deal. But somehow a spacious marbly room that shares a mall with Virgin Megastore, Crunch, and Sam Ash at the entrance to the Sunset Strip seems unlikely for this space. Suffice to say I'm no slave to labels, man. I'll review whatever's making my taste buds do jumping jacks at the moment. And Sushi Dan fits the bill.

Here's the dish.

It's on the top floor of the Virgin Megastore mall on Sunset Blvd. and Crescent Heights, right across from the Laemmle Theaters. You know the Laemmles. You were there to see an indie film, how many months ago? Damn, when was the last good indie film playing at the Laemmle, anyway? It's a space that's seen a couple of restaurants come and go, most recently a pretty decent fresh-Mex grill.

A big modern room with full bar greets you as you enter, along with the obligatory cute young Japanese hostess. There are a large number of dining room tables, and an expansive sushi bar... sadly, mostly empty. The best tables are in the back, past the huge aquarium whose seemingly continuous issues with water clarity are not, I hope, an ill omen for the restaurant. There, five or six booths line the windowed back wall, affording panoramic views of the Hollywood Hills and the east end of Sunset Strip: SkyBar, Chateau Marmont, the Marlboro Man-cum-iPod Girl billboard.

I confess I've only been there for lunch; why go any other time? There are three lunch special combos, all of which offer a mix of traditional nigiri sushi with one of the restaurant's many specialties. For $9.95, (that's right, $9.95), you get miso soup, five pieces of sushi and one of a selection of a dozen or so rolls. This may not sound like much. It is. The slabs of fish on the nigiri are huge. On my first visit what already looked like a gigantic salmon slab on my sushi turned out to be twice as big... the slice was double thick, folded under the rice. It was the entire end of a fillet which would probably be counted an entire "serving" at your local Weight Watchers. But for all the emphasis on quantity, the fish has been uniformly excellent on every visit. And refreshingly, the five varieties of fish reflect what people (well, what I, at least) in the 21st Century order at sushi bars: the salmon is complemented by hamachi, albacore, maguro, and seared tuna instead of the standard 80's palette of tired shrimp, fishy mackerel, cheap tamago and rubbery squid that make up so many combo plates.

But the highlight of the meal is your choice of one specialty item that comes with the combo. I've yet to work my way through the menu, but I can vouch for a couple. To call the Calamari Tempura Roll "generous" is like calling Gary Busey "quirky" or the Bush Administration "pesky." It's probably bigger than your head. The roll itself is tasty, all crisp nori, tender calamari highlighted with avocado, cucumber crabmeat and eel sauce. But it's invisible under a PILE of bic-lighter sized pieces of additional calamari tempura. Imagine your favorite steakhouse's "fried calamari" appetizer done Japanese style and dumped on a single maki roll, and you've got the idea. It's delicious, and if you are light luncher, probably enough for two. The Yellowtail Collar is a large piece of fish grilled to a slightly charred crispness on the outside but yielding nooks and crannies filled with an extraordinary amount of tender, flaky fish.

Downsides to Sushi Dan include spotty if friendly service. Several orders have been botched but corrected with apologies stopping just short of seppuku. My urgent need for a Bloody Mary at a hangover brunch brought a "so sorry." Apparently the batch of mix had gone bad waiting for anyone to order it. This leads to concern that the slow turnover could lead to fish laying about longer than it should. You can help. Go to Sushi Dan. Order fish. Demand a Bloody Mary. And then go check out that indie movie... I hear The Calamari -- sorry, The Squid and the Whale -- is good.

Red Booths and Raw Fish - Noshi Sushi

Noshi Sushi

4430 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90004
(323) 469-3458

Open 7 days til 9 pm
CASH ONLY

Google Local Info

It's a fucking zillion degrees in L.A. You've already imposed on your friends to swim in their pool twice, you've seen An Inconvenient Truth and every other thing playing at the Arclight. You've cooked out on the Weber until you have hot dogs coming out your ears. You feel like it's actually too damn hot to eat, but you've got to... and you've got escape the heat.

If you're like me, you want raw fish. Cool, fresh, buttery slabs of sushi. And you'd like it somewhere where you can relax and spend a couple of hours, not propped up on a slightly-too-small plastic chair in a spartan Zen room that should be cool but, because of the small space and the track lighting over the sushi bar, is just a little too close for comfort.

You want to go to Noshi Sushi. I think it's the best sushi restaurant in Los Angeles. Sure, there are places in Beverly Hills that do the thousand-dollar slice of fish. And of course there are the splendors of sushi row on Ventura Blvd. Katsu-ya makes delicious dishes in the "Japanese tapas" style -- things like Carpaccio of Yellowtail with Jalapeño, or Spicy Tuna on Crispy Rice Cakes -- as does my new local favorite Shintaro. There's Nozawa with his "Trust Me" special, and his amazing array of tunas and his blue crab rolls. But Nozawa's rice is always a little warm, and authentic or not, I don't want warm rice taking the cool edge off my raw fish on a hot night.

No, those places are great, but when my wife and say "Wanna go for sushi?", we mean Noshi. Why? Big slabs of fresh fish at reasonable prices, consistently amazing hamachi (which is, after all, the best of all possible sushi fish), and the most comfortable dining room of any sushi place in L.A.


It's in what looks like a nuclear fallout shelter on Beverly Blvd., smack in the middle of Koreatown. It's got a huge sushi bar, but it's one of the few sushi joints where I don't usually sit there... because Noshi's got booths. Big ones. Real, honest-to-god, spacious, red naugahyde booths. The place looks like it was probably once a steakhouse, and has the airy, high-ceilinged feel of a Japanese Hamburger Hamlet, without the cheesy decor.


You won't find any fancy, layered, fusion creations here. No specialty rolls. It's stripped down, dude. No fancy "premium cold sake list." They got hot sake, cold sake, and Asahi and Sapporo beer. Small bottles only, no large. No Kirin. Tempura/teriyaki combos and old-school sushi rule the day.

There are a very few specials on the wall. The albacore salad, a mound of crisp cucumber and shredded daikon and carrot with slabs of albacore tuna in a light, tangy dressing, is the perfect starter to beat the heat. After that, you'll recognize the menu from 1980's sushi bars: Tuna, eel, clam, giant clam, octopus, squid, shrimp, and scallop sushi; California rolls; spicy tuna rolls; salmon skin rolls. You can try to ask for your favorite nouvelle sushi option, but if you're going much beyond "Spicy Scallop Hand Roll," expect a blank stare.

But what they do, they do right: big, bold and fresh. My personal favorites are "white fish" (you get halibut unless you specify red snapper, which is usually better) - order it with ponzu sauce. Scallop sushi (ordered with mayo) is never better anywhere than here. And as for the hamachi (yellowtail) sushi... it's simply the most consistently sweet and buttery you'll find. It invokes in this blogger what his wife affectionately calls "hamachi-face" -- that look of utter epicurean delight that makes your face positively melt with joy. Which is much better than having it melt -- like the Nazi dude in Raiders of the Lost Ark -- in the heat outside.

Two tips:

- Arrive early. The restaurant is only open 'til 9:00 pm, and you can have a tough time parking and a long wait in the 7-9 window.

- Bring cash. It's cash only, and they have no ATM. But you don't need to bring too much... unless you eat more than your weight in sushi and drink more than three beers or sakes, you'll have a hard time spending more than $35.00 a person.

Perfect Lunch Special — Sushi Go 55

Sushi Go 55
333 S Alameda Street, Suite 313

Los Angeles, CA

(213) 687-0777
www.sushigo55.com
Google Local Info

Sorry for the absurdly long delay in posts; Thanks for keeping me in your RSS feed and your thoughts. Aside from surviving the holidays, sticking to New Year's resolutions, and finishing revisions to a novel and a play, I also spent a lot of time working on a longer foodie piece about all the streets in Los Angeles named after U.S. Presidents. It includes notes on Tito's Tacos, Mel's Fish Market, and a few other choice spots; you will also find out just what culinary delights Bush Way (yes, it exists) has to offer. Please check it out, and comment on it, lest NFT think I have no readers!

I also lost a couple of weeks to the Performance of my Civic Duty, serving on a criminal trial jury downtown. I got the dubiously warm holiday fuzzies by sending a kid -- who I'm quite sure was a gang-banger, but was clearly NOT proven guilty by the overworked and under-resourced DA -- back home to his momma for Christmas. I also had the perfect opportunity to sample the delights of nearby Little Tokyo.

It's a four-block walk from the courthouse to the heart of downtown's Japanese enclave; just far enough to work up a bit of an appetite. Since I was stuck on a two-week trial, I determined to try a different place for lunch every day. On Day Two, (after yet another mediocre experience at Suehiro -- some people like it, I think it's pretty skanky, and not in a good way) I was going to splurge and take myself to food crazy favorite Sushi Gen. Think a-gen! The line out the door was absurd. So I kept walking. There is, after all, a lot of raw fish in Little Tokyo. I found myself in the odd, sleepy quintessentially Japanese indoor mall on Alameda between 3rd and 4th. The third floor is a veritable Pacific Rim of restaurants, including a couple of excellent ramen houses. But it was too hot for soup that day (one of those 85 degree days in December. Curiously, I blame Al Gore). So I took myself to Sushi Go 55.

Never more I will never darken the door of Sushi Gen. At least, not for lunch. Sushi Go 55 -- aside from its oil saving, global-warming stopping name -- serves possibly the best value sushi meal in town. I know, I say "sushi lunch special" and you think, yeah, all the cuts of sushi I really don't like -- lox, a rubbery shrimp, a bite of an omelette, some flavorless tuna, a soggy California roll -- for $14.00. Not here. At Go 55, ten bucks -- that's right, $10 U.S currency -- gets you one piece each of tuna, albacore, yellowtail, salmon (okay, there's salmon), and snapper (the last three with a brush of light and delicious ponzu sauce, the yellowtail with a bit of wafer-thin shaved onion), a blue crab handroll, miso soup, a wee cucumber salad, and a couple of even wee-er side dishes. And the quality of the fish isn't "value" at all. It's fresh, perfectly chilled, and tender... a delightful antidote to a blazing hot winter day in L.A.

I went back to a couple of times for the very same meal. Each time, it simply, reliably, and cheaply kicked ass. Between Go 55 and my discovery of T.O.T. the following day (more about that in my next post!), I never actually made it to any other lunch spots.

Seriously, Little Tokyo is almost enough to make me want to serve on a jury again.

Not.