Cheers at Kanpai Japanese Sushi Bar & Grill

Fruity Albacore Sashimi

Seared Sorbet Tuna Sushi

Japanese Glass Shrimp Sushi

Japanese Scallop Sashimi with Truffle Citrus Sauce

White Fish Sushi with Black Summer Truffle

Sweet Shrimp Sushi

Kanpai!!! at Kanpai on Lincoln Boulevard

I love sushi bars. But particularly, I am fond of sushi bars that offer daily menus on sheets of paper marked with the date along with the title “Today’s Specials.” Restaurants like these give an impression of freshness, of ever-changing variety. Restaurants like these tend to cater to discerning tastes and are, therefore, a bit on the high end in price, but well worth the splurge.

Kanpai Japanese Sushi Bar and Grill of Los Angeles is such a restaurant. Even though it’s been two years since my last visit there and six years since my first tasting, Kanpai’s mercurial menu continues to amaze me. Although many of the same fancy ingredients recur, such as truffles, kombu, caviar, yuzu, and that dark brown dressing that the chef calls their “special soy sauce,” it is their seafood selection that I find really impressive.

From spotted sardine to baby yellowtail, orange clam to pike and Japanese glass shrimp, Kanpai carries breeds of fish that in most sushi restaurants are practically unheard of.

Yet for an upscale dining locale, Kanpai shows that it also has a casual and fun side, with menu items like the Sushi Pizza, and the LMU Roll (named after the nearby Loyola Marymount College) which has deep-fried sweet potato inside and is topped with eel and avocado.

Kanpai, which means Cheers in Japanese, is certainly cheerful on most nights, perhaps because the place serves more than 20 premium sakes from Japan, which most likely contributes to its incredibly boisterous atmosphere. In addition, the joint is open everyday until 1 a.m. 

Although memories of my favorite sushi at Kanpai had not yet faded—halibut with yuzu pepper, snow crab with sesame mayo, salmon with basil sauce—I was more than willing to try some of the new items I had never before seen on their Specials menu: the Fruity Albacore Sashimi for $23 (I learned this dish is fruity because it incorporates figs) and the Seared Sorbet Tuna Sushi for $8 (sweetly seasoned and oddly meaty in appearance). Even the menu dictates that both of these are a Must Try!!!

The menu also declares the Japanese Glass Shrimp sushi is a “rare item in the U.S.A.” With its dubious appearance, this delicacy may taste like shrimp, but its squiggly and soft texture has a strange melt-in-your-mouth effect that suggests something not quite shrimplike.

The Japan Scallop Sashimi with Truffle Citrus Sauce for $18 was some of the freshest scallop I’ve ever had, while the white fish with black summer truffle was inspiring. But nothing could have completed the meal better than good old-fashioned sweet shrimp, whose beheaded state was visible right on the sushi bar—rows of twitching heads and antennules, displayed as a display and as a dare (Do you dare try me?).

For the uninitiated, sweet shrimp is normally served as both sushi and as a crunchy afterthought, with the shrimp bodies laid raw on top of rice nigiri-style, followed by the heads which are deep-fried and presented with ponzu sauce for dipping. At Kanpai, the heads are plated with the sushi in their pre-fried condition as adornment as much as for effect, and then later the server asks, “Did you want to eat the heads?” To this I understandingly nod, knowing he would take them to the fryer.

Personally, it’s my style to masticate as much of the prickly fried heads as I can, but leave the unchewable parts and hardest-to-digest spiky bits behind. Kanpai!

Kanpai

8325 Lincoln Blvd., Los Angeles

310-338-7223

A Grand Welcome to Sushi World

Located in Cypress, CA

Anaheim Chili Tempura Roll 

Hand Roll with Chopped Tuna and Yellowtail

Albacore Sushi

Baked Blue Crab Hand Roll

It's a Sushi World

It’s sushi nirvana at Sushi World of Cypress, which is celebrating its grand opening with chef Jason Levine introducing the house specials and spicy sauces galore. Rare is the opportunity of finding great food and friendly service in one location, but here you can discover both, along with an entertaining and upbeat energy.

Some of Sushi World’s unique dishes include the Anaheim Chili Tempura Roll for $14, a brilliant creation using hollowed-out Anaheim chilis to wrap around sushi rice, avocado, and marinated and smoked salmon. The entire roll is then tempura-fried and treated with “Sushi World Sweet Sauce.” There is also the Seared Hamachi Carpaccio, which is dressed in a yuzu ponzu sauce, for $12.

Inside the Anaheim chili shell, the salmon definitely tastes fresh and smoked, and contrasts wonderfully with the fried batter exterior. The sweet brown sauce marries well with the piquancy of the chilis.

According to Chef Jason, all sauces and desserts at Sushi World are made from scratch. Displaying containers of sauces ranging in spiciness level from hot to torturously hot, he explained that each habanero-and-tomatillo-based sauce has a playful name: “Please Don’t Sue Me,” “Hot Molten Lava,” and “Devil’s Vomit,” the last of which is mostly orange in hue because it contains the most habanero, and therefore is the most hellaciously hot.

Rather than starting slow, I jumped straight to the extreme end of the spice spectrum by ordering a yellowtail and tuna hand roll with the sauce that would burn the brightest, and as my tongue felt the excruciating pain, I wondered why I hadn’t heeded the chef’s admonishment to begin with the milder one, questioned whether I was a glutton for punishment. I cried; I laughed; and then to quell the fire, I chased the hand roll with a delightful, melt-in-your-mouth piece of albacore sushi, followed by a delectable baked blue crab hand roll with garlic aioli enveloped in soy paper.

Sated, I left Sushi World to go back to Real World, and I am left with the feeling one has when exiting a movie theater in which the feature film had been so engrossing that reality seems a bit harsh to return to afterward—and that is how you know when beyond food and service, a restaurant has also delivered transport.

Sushi World

10953 Meridian Drive, Cypress

714-828-FISH

A Taste of Yanagi Japanese Bistro

Furikake Popcorn Shrimp

Salmon Sushi with Avocado, Red Onions, Shaved Bonito

Spicy Garlic Tuna Tataki Sushi

Warm Springs Roll with Rice Paper

Yanagi Japanese Bistro of Redondo Beach

Named after the Japanese word for willow tree, Yanagi Japanese Bistro is a quaint, casual affair situated on the main thoroughfare of Artesia in Redondo Beach.

Although not exactly a formal dining establishment, Yanagi is certainly a more upscale alternative to the fast food-style “Rice Things” Japanese dive just across the street, where one can pick up simple rolls of pickled radish or gourd for just $2.99, or sushi combinations served with miso soup that start at $7.99.

The menu at Yanagi is fancier than that, and while its wall menu boasts traditional sushi fare such as toro, blue fin and uni, there are also a few surprises, such as furikake popcorn shrimp for $11 (six curly pieces of shrimp tempura slathered with a sweet mayonnaise sauce and dusted with seasoned seaweed bits known as furikake), and albacore sashimi with crispy onions for $14.

I notice the chef preparing salmon sushi laden with avocado and shaved bonito, and my mind flashes back to something similar I once saw at Koi Restaurant in Seal Beach. It was exactly that, salmon sushi with avocado and shaved bonito, only Koi had added white onions to it as well. (I’ve met picky sushi snobs who will only eat salmon sushi with chopped raw white onions.) I ask Yanagi's chef if he has white onions in his sushi station and am told he only has red onions. “Even better,” I say (I personally prefer red onions anyway). Then I request that ponzu sauce be added to all of this and suddenly feel very much like a picky snob myself.

Other types of sushi may be ordered: “spicy garlic tuna tataki” or “spicy garlic albacore” ($4.50 to $5 for two pieces), although in my opinion there was no spiciness at all, only a garlicky essence mixed with ponzu sauce.

The owner suggests I try the “Warm Springs” roll, an unconventional six-piece hunger-squelcher for $12.50, which features the uncommon yet delightful rice paper as a wrap, the gooey, slippery alternative to soy paper and seaweed. “Warm Springs” encases spicy tuna, imitation crab, soft shell crab, avocado, and shrimp tempura in its translucent folds, and after it is placed on puddles of spicy mayonnaise and eel sauce, it gets sprinkled with furikake as well. And why not? It’s a medley of color and flavor as it is, although after this saccharine, syrupy overload, you’re bound to want to skip dessert. Yet the desserts here, too, sound tempting: you can choose from green tea cheesecake or the ever-unusual fried plum wine ice cream.

Yanagi Japanese Bistro

2400 Artesia Blvd., Redondo Beach

310-372-6500

Selections Abound at Sakura Ichi of Pomona

Sayori (Half Beak)

Spicy Tuna on Crispy Rice

Shima Aji

Orange Served with Plum Powder