A MINI-COURSE IN JAPANESE CULTURE

Gardena’s Kyoto Sukiyaki is a nightclub and restaurant, but it’s also a one-evening mini-course in modern Japanese culture. Despite a shopping mall location and a name that sounds suspiciously like one of those places where the chef can make a butcher knife do everything but sing “The Tennessee Waltz,” Kyoto Sukiyaki manages to be something quite authentic.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I really had a good time at this restaurant. Why am I embarrassed? For one thing, the English menu is full of Americanized dishes like sukiyaki and teriyaki chicken, while their real drawing cards, the seasonal dishes, are hidden in a Japanese menu bound in wood. For another, there is the dimly lit, sing-along piano bar complete with beautiful hostesses and overworked Japanese businessmen. Not exactly a progressive stronghold, but high camp and relaxing to boot. Besides, it’s very Japanese.

The first step to serious eating here is to shut yourself up in a quietly elegant tatami room and close the fusuma (sliding panel) for total privacy. Sit cross-legged on embroidered cushions at a black lacquer table. Take your time. The only thing missing is an after-dinner futon .

Step 2 is to find a waitress who will translate the menu for you. Fortunately, this is not hard. One hot evening, our gracious kimono-clad waitress carefully explained the special summer dishes, making them sound especially inviting. The refreshing summer dishes of Japan are light and cool to counteract the heat and humidity of the Japanese summer.

Tamagodofu , a pale yellow tofu made not from soy bean but from coddled egg, is just the right way to start a midsummer evening. Try a cloudy tumbler of iced sake, then have another. Feel cool? Then why not try namagakizu , raw oysters marinated in rice vinegar and served over cracked ice.

We enjoyed a salmon-skin salad--iceberg lettuce given an extra crunch from crackling bits of warm salmon skin. This was followed by one of the house specialties, katsu - rasoba , little flakes of tempura-battered whitefish atop buckwheat noodles that had been kneaded into a pale summer green with minced tea leaves.

The restaurant also features a deluxe kaiseki dinner at $35 a person. Chef Masahiro Nakano of Tokyo has designed a menu that appeals to the Japanese businessman and his American counterpart, but is in actuality nothing like the traditional kaiseki dinner, the artful and delicate meal served before a formal tea ceremony. This kaiseki is more like an elaborate eating contest--there are 11 courses and enough food to make a sumo wrestler have to loosen his belly band.

Every dish is elaborately decorated, either with natural garnishes or with the food itself. Japanese cuisine uses no artificial garnishes, no plastic leaves, no paper umbrellas. If it is on the plate, it is supposed to be eaten.

Even the starter course was an elaborate trompe l’oeil , a star of tofu that had been marinated in coffee. It was almost black, and looked like a little stone you’d find on a Japanese beach, but it had a slightly sweet, highly unusual flavor and I liked it.

Zensai is the appetizer course. Here it was a rectangular dish of salty marinated octopus, a bland cross-cut chicken liver enrobed in yellow cheese, and a flower-shaped mass of mashed green bean.

Suimono (“water things”) followed, a handmade bowl filled with wispy shredded carrot and French bean, floating gently in a clear broth flavored with distinctly un -Japanese bacon, which strangely added great balance.

If the meal had ended here, I would have been satisfied. The next two courses were tasty, but they just didn’t seem to belong with the rest of the meal.

Sashimi of red snapper and tuna, which in the context of kaiseki seem quite ordinary, could easily have been ordered in the restaurant’s first-rate sushi bar downstairs. Then there was a large broiled steak in a sizzling dish, already cut up as if for an oversized 5-year-old. As if that weren’t enough, it was accompanied by a baked potato and broccoli.

There is an explanation for these out-of-character dishes: they are all expensive delicacies in Japan. Since the restaurant caters largely to Japanese businessmen anxious to entertain in style, the traditional Japanese luxuries--steak and sashimi-- have been added to the meal.

The five courses that followed were all quite good, but by then we were too full to eat them with any appetite. I was especially impressed by a deep-fried souffle of shrimp and egg in a tofu basket, and sea eel with cucumber, snuggled on a bed of wakame (soft seaweed).

At the end of the meal, we were more than ready to retire to the piano lounge, where we watched automobile executives singing soulfully into a microphone. At each man’s elbow was his very own bottle of big-name whisky.

This too is traditional. Whisky is so expensive in Japan that bars allow regulars to keep their own bottles, carefully labeled with the name of the owner, on a special shelf. These bars are an important aspect of Japanese culture--it is here that many multinational business deals are consummated. Better brush up on your “Melancholy Baby” if you’re planning your next merger.

Kyoto Sukiyaki, 15122 S. Western Ave., Gardena, (213) 321-1647. Open for lunch, 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m.; for dinner, 5-10 p.m. Closed Sunday. Full bar. Parking in lot. Visa, MasterCard and American Express accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $40-$70.