Two Japanese Restaurants Worth a Detour : Desert sushi in an overwhelming setting in Palm Springs

Otani--A Garden Restaurant, 1000 E. Tahquitz Dr., Palm Springs. (619) 327-6700. Open for dinner Tuesday through Sunday, for lunch Tuesday through Friday. All major credit cards accepted. Full bar. Parking in lot. Dinner for two, food only, $35-$50.

The construction costs for Otani--A Garden Restaurant in Palm Springs must have equaled the GNP of a small developing country. The dining room resembles a massive, indoor Shinto shrine. An A-frame straw roof reaches about 50 feet in the air with a giant, sloping centerpiece of copper and cherrywood hanging down over a display cooking area. The floor is a patchwork of enormous stones; bamboo trees spring up from it everywhere you look.

Around the perimeter of the restaurant is a lush garden complete with waterfall and babbling brook that frame the dining room behind a glass wall. The understated Japanese design aesthetic may be alive and well, but not here.

There’s nothing understated about the dining concept either. This is a restaurant with four areas, each with a different specialty: teppan-yaki , the Benihana-style griddled dishes; tempura, deep-fried, lightly battered seafoods and vegetables; yakitori , grilled meats on skewers; and sashimi , raw fish in various forms. This departmentalization is popular in Japan, where nearly everything is modular these days. It’s hard to guess whether the concept will catch on in this country.

It certainly seems to have caught on in Palm Springs.

“We chose Palm Springs because it is a destination city both for Japanese tourists and American businessmen,” said Kenji Yoshimoto, executive v.p. of New Otani America and general manager of the New Otani Hotel and Garden in Little Tokyo.

Ralph Arnhym of the Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce also sees the logic in it. “We have had a marked increase in visitors from Pacific Rim countries, particularly Japan,” he said. “Most of them come to unwind and adjust their body clocks, or just plain shoot a round of golf.”

On the Thursday night I visited, the restaurant there was a 20-minute wait for a table in the dining room, where dishes can be sampled from any of the individual cooking areas. The sushi, tempura and yakitori bars were full as well.

I thought the dining room would provide the best variety--but it didn’t necessarily provide the best food. That’s because Japanese cuisine is prepared for immediate consumption. Yakitori cools quickly (ours arrived lukewarm), tempura tends to dry out and many Japanese sushi men refuse to let their creations be hauled into a dining room. I suggest you sit at the various cooking bars when eating here, despite the fact that busy nights often find them full. I think you’ll find the wait worthwhile.

We asked to start with sushi, but instead got steaming bowls of miso soup and some vinegared carrot. (The Japanese generally end their meals that way.) Then our slightly flustered waitress brought the tempura dishes.

Tempura can be ordered a la carte or in various set courses that the restaurant calls matsu (pine), take (bamboo) or ume (plum). We chose the a la carte menu and got soft, creamy cloves of garlic; a crunchy, weakly flavored soft shell crab; crisp spears of asparagus; a velvety scallop; slices of Japanese eggplant, and a tongue-twister called Japanese-style French-fried American potatoes. The potatoes turned out to be a thinly disguised joke: virtually raw potato slices cloaked in tempura batter. Give them a miss.

Another problem with the tempura: the batter. Ours was dry from overcooking, and had an oily finish that lingered on the tongue, as if the cooking oil had been used too many times. For good tempura, new oil is an absolute must for each order.

Things improved considerably when we tackled the yakitori , which can be ordered in a special 12-skewer course for $19.95 with 10 different items. Traditionally, yakitori should be confined to chicken preparations--it means literally “grilled chicken”--with assorted vegetable accompaniments or chicken parts like liver, gizzard or heart. In this restaurant, it refers to anything the chef can spear.

The best ones we sampled were jumbo clam, bacon-wrapped quail egg, asparagus beef roll and a chicken vegetable roll stuffed with a minced ball of chicken like the filling of a Chinese dumpling. Among the chef’s more unusual yakitori offerings were tuna and green onion, tofu and green bean and salmon with mushroom.

But the hottest ticket of all is the sushi bar, and deservedly so. The sushi chefs here appear to have a higher degree of skill than their co-chefs at the other stations. All their creations are first-rate.

The sea urchin, fresh water eel and something they call Manhattan roll--cooked tuna with kaiware daikon (daikon sprouts) in a nori wrapper--are terrific, as good as you will find in a Tokyo fish market. And the sushi called Dynamite is impossibly filling but irresistible; it’s a giant clam shell filled with scallops, snapper and Japanese mushrooms, baked under a salamander in a creamy mayonnaise.

If you still have room, there are Western desserts such as ice cream fudge cake, cheese cake with various fruit sauces, or Japanese rice flour pastries stuffed with sweet bean paste. If not, ask for a digestive glass of green tea and directions to the nearest golf course.

Recommended dishes: salmon skin salad, $5.95; Manhattan roll, $3.50; sake oyster shooter, $3.50 (seasonal); tempura garlic, $1; 12 stick yakitori, $19.95; cheese cake with fruit sauce, $3.50.