Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (free biff chip and kipper ebooks txt) 📗

wasn’t even up to New York standards. I moved on to the Hump, yet another fashionable spot. This one is owned by Brian Vidor, son of director Charles Vidor, and is located at the tiny, retro-feeling Santa Monica Airport. The Hump, with its fireplace, orchids, and bamboo plants, is perhaps the most attractive sushi restaurant in L.A. Nobody appears to care that the Hump—a World War II term for the Himalayas—refers to the struggle against the Japanese.

A few slices of red snapper sashimi were vibrant, and the toro was properly rich and fatty (if somewhat mushy), but the rest of the fish was uninteresting. The three of us didn’t eat much, but the bill, including tax, tip, and a bottle of flabby Hawley viognier with perhaps the most bitter finish ever found in a California white wine, came to $289.

I wasn’t the least bit full, so I thought this was the perfect night to make a few unscheduled sushi stops.

I peeked into the Marina del Rey branch of Tokyo Delve’s, acclaimed for a staff that supposedly breaks into spontaneous dance. As I walked in, “YMCA” by the Village People was playing, but the sushi chefs were doing nothing more interesting than making sushi. I left feeling cheated, like a tourist who visits Buckingham Palace and misses the changing of the guard.

Then I went to Crazy Fish, located on the outskirts of Beverly Hills and reputed to have lines out the door most of the day. Among the more than thirty kinds of sushi rolls offered, there is the Crazy Fish roll, which I could not resist. It was essentially several varieties of second-rate fish sticking out of some rice. Crazy Fish is the establishment offering the oy vey (Yiddish for “Oh, no! or “Oh, my!”) salmon sushi, and it also features the Jewish roll of salmon and cream cheese. These 1 3 0

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appear to be transparent marketing ploys designed to lure unwary customers from the Harkham Hillel Hebrew Academy across the street.

The next day, I drove to Studio City to observe the wonders of Sushi on Tap, but I arrived to find it renamed Sushi Yasuke and the staff no longer willing to tap dance. It was practically empty, and when I suggested to the blond Japanese hostess that business must have been better before the music died, she giggled and replied, “Oh, yes, but we are really tired of tap dancing.”

I had one more stylish restaurant to try: the environmentally correct Sushi Roku in Hollywood, which has a statement of guiding principles printed on the first page of its menu: “In our attempt to save the earth and its environment, Sushi Roku has been built with environment-friendly products and recycles in every way possible.” The restaurant was done up in earth tones—no ozone-depleting pastels here. The menu was written in a style that recalls fifties restaurants specializing in Continental cuisine: Hot Appetizers From The Sea, Appetizers From The Garden (including one of my favorite farm-fresh garden appetizers, tofu), Cold Appetizers From The Sea, and so on.

I ordered the twenty-three-dollar Executive Bento Box, even though no Hollywood executive who wanted to preserve his reputation would ever order a box lunch. (Perhaps a better name, reflecting its bargain price, would be the Mailroom Bento Box.) Everything I tasted was bright, colorful, and decidedly on the sweet side. Virtually all the customers were Caucasian, the males wearing white T-shirts under unbuttoned dress shirts with the tails hanging out. If people are going to dress like that in restaurants, is Earth really worth saving? Next to me, a young couple appeared to be on a first date; he seemed calm from the waist up, but his feet twitched uncontrollably throughout the meal, vibrating with nervousness. At the end of lunch, he said to her, “You have an expense account or anything?”

At Matsuhisa in Beverly Hills, friends and I were seated at a plain wooden table adjoining a similar table occupied by gentlemen with tattoos, nose rings, and T-shirts. How fortunate I was to be dining alongside Korn.

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Matsuhisa is the original American restaurant of Nobu Matsuhisa, the genius who invented Japanese-Peruvian-Californian crossbred cuisine. I seldom deviate from his signature items, even though they haven’t changed much in a decade or so, because I’m always eating with friends who haven’t been there, and I want them to taste everything I love. We had lobster ceviche, yellowtail dotted with a sliver of jalapeño, “new-style” sashimi (slightly seared, in a light sauce of lime and soy, and not so new after all these years), halibut sashimi with a dab of red-chile paste, and Matsuhisa’s ubiquitous and unforgettable black cod marinated in miso.

I returned by myself at 1:30 p.m. on a midweek afternoon, wanting to try the sushi bar, naïvely figuring I’d have no trouble getting a spot at such a late hour. After waiting thirty-five minutes crushed into a miniature waiting area, I finally was shown to a tiny seat. Where comfort is concerned, I could just as well have been dining in a subway during rush hour. The sushi, as I expected, was impeccable, but Matsuhisa has so many thrilling dishes, I don’t recommend wasting your appetite on sushi. This is the one sushi restaurant where fish on rice seems an afterthought.

The establishment where sushi has risen to a place of glory and honor is Sushi Nozawa in the otherwise undiscovered Eureka Plaza in Studio City. Here you find Kazunori Nozawa, the so-called Sushi Nazi. He is known by no other name. He is the Sushi Nazi as surely as John Wayne is the Duke.

I have grown weary of “Nazi” as a culinary descriptor. It all started with the Seinfeld Soup Nazi, and these days any restaurant proprietor who fails to fawn over his customers becomes the Nazi designee of his cuisine. There are probably still a