RESTAURANT REVIEW : Sushi Restaurant’s Imaginative Food Is Served Up With Raw Energy

Sushi has many devotees in these parts, where it is taken seriously as some sort of culinary art form. Not so with the Japanese, of course, who have for centuries regarded the finger-sized clumps of vinegared rice and their sundry toppings as little more than a snack food.

Now, just to complicate the issue, consider Delve’s Sushi Bar. Delve’s is a heavy-metal hangout that looks as if it jumped clear across the Pacific Rim in one bound, a restaurant-nightclub where most of the chefs (or should we call them disc jockeys?) look like escaped shinjinrui , the new breed of Japanese youth found in and around the Harajuku section of Tokyo.

At Delve’s, sushi is neither snack nor art form. It is just the excuse to get you in the door. If there’s another restaurant where eating is more beside the point than it is here, I’d like to know about it.

Like the majority of neighborhood restaurants in Japan, Delve’s is no bigger than your basic rabbit warren, squeezed in between two buildings on a gritty North Hollywood block. From the outside, it looks like a bar you’d find in a David Lynch movie, thanks to the one narrow, windowless, wooden door you are forced to enter through.

But inside, it is the personification of youthful energy, with flashing lights and neon fish dancing off the punk-black walls, pounding music and a symphony of male voices shouting “Irasshai!” (welcome!) as you are beckoned to your table.

Make that your counter. Oh, there are a few tables crushed up against the long wall parallel to the sushi bar, but most of the seating here is on hard stools, where you get to shout back at the chefs yourself. They can’t really hear you, of course, because they’re too busy talking into the little headsets they all wear.

They wear these contraptions in order to get food from the kitchen and to communicate with the waiters--all of whom, incidentally, speak flawless Japanese. They manage somewhat in English, too, when their voices aren’t drowned out by the likes of Stevie Wonder, the Clash and other musicians you hear constantly during a meal here. Not to worry. The food comes from somewhere, eventually.

It doesn’t come, however, from the hands of masters. Delve’s serves a variety of spunky, imaginative hand rolls and most of the basic California faves like yellowtail, Spanish mackerel and spicy tuna, as well as a variety of dishes cooked in a back kitchen. And the feeling from this corner is, as long as you stick to the sushi, the food won’t spoil the fun.

The hand rolls are probably the best things to eat here and have catchy names such as pink panther and sunrise. Sunrise roll has smoked salmon on the outside, where you expect the seaweed, and a filling of sweet shrimp and tobiko (flying-fish roe). It’s fun to eat, but slippery if you pick it up.

There are some good novelty items, too, like one called giant clam dynamite. That one comes piping hot in its own shell, a creamy mixture of thinly sliced clam, mayonnaise and more flying-fish roe. Salmon skin sunomono , a vinegary mixture of cucumber and little bits of grizzled salmon, makes a good complement to the dish.

While you’re eating all this, your attention is going to be diverted by a series of gimmicks designed to make the restaurant more fun. At 7, 9 and 11 p.m. on the dot, everybody plays Lucky Lamps. Wherever you sit at Delve’s, there is a little electronic lamp just above you and at odd hours they begin to flash, stopping in front of one lucky customer, whose check is then picked up by the house.

But there’s more. Any party spending more than $30 gets to play Challenge the Sushi, where a table-tennis ball is shot the length of the restaurant through a clear plastic tube onto a giant pinball game behind the sushi counter. Everybody wins something, usually a Delve’s T-shirt or credit for free sushi on the next visit.

If I had limited my choices to the cooked dishes here, there wouldn’t have been a second visit. My ill-fated first visit brought one of the sweetest, most inedible sukiyakis I have ever encountered (despite being served in a cute little iron pot), several skewers of greasy, leaden kushiyaki (batter-dipped meats and vegetables) and a dish called garlic chicken, which was pieces of white meat in a horrible puddle of cornstarch.

Luckily, that wasn’t all I ate and, after a few sake cocktails with names like uwaki (which, as I’m sure the management would prefer you did not know, means “marital infidelity”) and kudoku , literally “hustling a date,” I found myself as loose as everyone else in the place. In the final analysis, to quote The Who, the kids are all right--and Delve’s is really some hoot. Just don’t expect the kids to do any serious cooking.

Suggested dishes: salmon skin sunomono , $1.80; pink panther hand roll, $4.50; giant clam dynamite, $4.50.

Delve’s Sushi Bar, 5239 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, (818) 766-3868. Dinner 5 p.m. to midnight Monday s through Thursday s and Saturday s, 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. Friday s . Beer and wine only. Parking lot in rear. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $20 to $35.