RESTAURANT REVIEW : Sakana Club’s Missing Link: Patrons

The first time I ate at the Sakana Club, I arrived around noon and was greeted on the sidewalk by a pretty woman handing out copies of lunch menus to passersby. I didn’t know if I should take one or not. “I’m actually going inside,” I told her. “Oh!” she said, both surprised and pleased. She escorted me up a ramp with white railing--it felt like boarding a boat--then handed me over to the maitre d’.

The Sakana Club has been open around five months now and has been battling for a liquor license all that time. This is why many potential customers have gone elsewhere. Indeed, as two of us were seated at a spacious table in a cool gray dining room, there was only one other occupied table. This is a shame, for I had a thoroughly wonderful, if expensive lunch.

The decor is at once spare and fancy. Tinted windows muted the bright daylight and made the greenery outside look greener, the sky bluer. A waiter appeared instantaneously to take drink orders and a busboy wearing short white gloves removed the extra tableware and poured ice water.

I was particularly excited about eating lunch at the Sakana Club because I’d heard that Elmer Azuma, formerly of Chabuya, was recently appointed as the lunch chef. He is renowned for constructing wonderful, unusual and tasty little French-Japanese dishes. Our only difficulty came in deciding which dishes to order.

Sauteed shrimp Vietnamese-style, consisted of six big, plump, succulent shrimp, with sprigs of basil, mint, cilantro and other herbs, all of which you wrapped in thin rice skins and dipped in fish sauce. It was hard to make the little packages fast enough. A special of lobster medallions with wild mushrooms and petals of zucchini, was beautiful to look at, though not nearly as memorable as those shrimp.

My friend’s miso soup laden with shellfish and a chunk of salmon was delicious and curative. I had a beautiful and subtle pale green cream of split pea soup spiked with slivers of smoked black cod.

I’d allowed our waiter to talk me into the Norwegian salmon, even though I’m just not that crazy about salmon. But the reason salmon doesn’t thrill me, I discovered, is that Elmer Azuma doesn’t cook it for me every time. The small chunks of dill-marinated fish were so gently cooked that they were still translucent, moist and delicate. A bit of briny salmon roe topped each chunk. Canadian scallops with pesto and wild mushrooms were also sweet and fresh and gloriously tasty.

We came back for dinner and arrived one chilly night to a chilly restaurant--the heating system was on the blink. I knew dinner would be very different from lunch because Azuma wasn’t cooking it. We sat in the back room, which has a dramatic window onto the kitchen and a remarkable wall of bubbling water. The maitre d’ explained that dinner was “less California Cuisine, more like fine dining.” In time, this enigmatic statement became clearer.

The cooking was still Franco-Japanese, but the night chef’s creativity was channelled more into sauces and presentation; the lunch chef concentrated on surprising and novel combinations. In other words, dinner was more Continental -Japanese, lunch more French-California-Japanese. Younger, more experimental diners will love lunch; older, more conservative diners will prefer dinner.

All of which is not to say we didn’t enjoy our dinner--it was satisfying, often delicious and invariably amusing to the eye.

We found ourselves eating mostly seafood, which isn’t surprising: Sakana means fish. The crab cakes made of Alaskan King crab were fat, juicy, lightly crunchy and topped with caviar--easily among the best I’ve had. But the assorted sashimi was the real show-stopper: Thin slices of raw fish and assorted colored seaweeds spilled forth in profusion from a little round ice igloo. Eating it became an act of landscape, demolition.

Scallop salad was more scallop theatrical extravaganza, with dollar-sized shellfish stacked in a big shell elevated over a field of dyed yellow rice and purple pansies.

I won the prize for the most dramatic entree with my assorted tempura, fried vegetable, shrimp and chicken bits arranged upright in a paper crown and a nest made of fried potato strings. Rather more staid was a veal loin steak, which was a terrific piece of meat in a murky cheesy tomatoey sauce. A delicate steamed halibut seemed ill-paired with shiitake mushrooms in a dark sauce, though the pumpkin chips sprinkled on top of the fish were utterly delicious.

Desserts are fancy and fun. Good creme brulee comes with a cookie, fruit and a chocolate cup of Chantilly cream. A heady chestnut-chocolate mousse looked like some kind of cosmological model, what with wide, thin discs of marbleized white and brown chocolates and small round blobs of mousse stacked together.

We huddled around our teacups, enjoyed the wall of water and fervently wished the Sakana Club a liquor license, a new heating system and many more customers, all of which it sorely deserves.

Sakana Club, 11600 San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 447-7777. Lunch Monday-Friday, dinner Monday-Saturday. Major credit cards. Liquor license pending. Valet parking. Dinner for two, food only $60 to $100.