JAPANESE-AMERICAN FOOD IN A PLEASING AMBIANCE

I have sworn never to review another sushi restaurant. The prospect of cold cuts for dinner just fills me with inertia. I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel, now get outta here.

However, I did want to try Sea Food Show, a new Japanese-American seafood restaurant in a brand-new La Palma shopping complex (or rather dining complex--there are about five restaurants in it). For one thing, an interesting restaurant with Franco-Japanese leanings I checked out two months ago had a sign saying it was “presented by Sea Food Show.” For another, I discovered that the Sea Food Show chain is itself owned by a corporation that owns more than 500 restaurants in Japan, plus a couple in Hawaii and at least one in China.

This particular Sea Food Show is quite an attractive room, somehow cozily expansive and briskly conspiratorial. The central aisle is sunken and, coupled with a dormer skylight that runs the length of the building, this gives the restaurant a vaguely submarine-like feeling. There’s an amusing tableau over the display kitchen: giant statues of a crab and lobster seated at a table and holding chopsticks, being waited on by an immense tuna with seal flippers for holding his tray.

At the door you can grab an informative leaflet on the history of both sushi and the Kyotaru corporation. I was eager to try the Kamigata-style sushi--the leaflet stresses it’s the older style based on vinegared rice, which prevailed until the introduction, about a hundred years ago, of the familiar Edomae style that predominates in American sushi restaurants. I mean to be fair--I do want to know whether there’s some kind of sushi I can get excited about.

Unfortunately, when I tried to order some Kamigata sushi, the waitress informed me that they don’t actually have any on the dinner menu. I could, however, order a Kamigata item called chakin-sushi which is on the takeout menu. This turned out to be a ball of sweetened rather than vinegared rice, topped with a tiny shrimp and wrapped in thin sheets of sweetened egg. All right, I’d done my duty. Now to the American side of the menu.

This wasn’t bad, generally speaking. The Cajun prawns were among the best I’ve had--very fresh, a little salty, papery-skinned and mildly hot, though the sauce that came with it was bland and oily. And the grilled seafood salad was delightful of its austere type: just various lettuces topped with a small collection of seafood (tuna, salmon, shrimp, scallop) in an attractive plum-flavored vinaigrette.

The menu is divided into American fish dishes (including the odd bit of chicken or steak in combo plates), mesquite-grilled fish and Japanese fish dishes. The Japanese selection is surprisingly small, just two sushi plates and the amusingly named “wrap and roll,” which is a California roll plus two brownish cones, said to be wrapped in corn, which tasted like jelly doughnuts.

The seafood was very fresh, and I do recommend both the lobster tail and the crab claws, which come with pots of drawn butter and teriyaki sauce to choose from. Fish are treated Sea Food Broiler-style, mesquite-grilled with a sprinkling of paprika. It’s understandable when the ocean catch of the day gets this treatment, but a little bizarre to find trout mesquite-grilled and served paprika-side up. This is not the most obvious or the most sensible thing to do to a mild freshwater fish.

On the American side there was an amazingly hot and cuminy, practically cruel, blackened mahi-mahi. I had a sneaky liking for it because it was so much more forceful than the merely incinerated blackened fish I’ve been having lately. The non-fish items were chancier. The teriyaki chicken was dry, and the fettuccine, on an insert menu, was perfunctory: overdone pasta with a little butter and some shreds of seafood.

After the austere and health-foody fish entrees, the dessert selection is surprisingly lush. I guess if you’ve dined on California rolls and sashimi you have a right to something like the chocoholic pie, which is more or less a brownie with chocolate frosting. There’s also a terrific cheesecake, or rather a sort of sour cream mousse on crust, light as a cloud. Give me more! The bread pudding, a bit dry and stodgy in itself, had an exemplary whiskey sauce, buttery and sweet. On the other hand, one pie (custard, I assume) was hideous. If you threw it on the floor it would probably bounce.

This is certainly a pleasant place, and the grilled fish is as good as Sea Food Broiler’s. Prices are in about the same range. Appetizers $3.95 to $5.95. At lunch, American seafood dishes are $5.95 to $7.95, Japanese dishes $7.95 to $10.95. At dinner, American seafood dishes are $7.95 to $10.95, Japanese dinners $8.95 to $11.95. Plain grilled fish are on a changeable insert/blackboard menu, currently running $12.95.

SEAFOOD SHOW RESTAURANT 50 Centerpointe Drive (off Orangethorpe Avenue between Valley View Street and the entrance to the westbound California 91), La Palma

(714) 670-0137

Open for lunch Monday through Friday, for dinner nightly; Sunday brunch. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted.