Good, Clean Eating

Here is the Westside’s Little Little Tokyo, a three-block strip of multistory malls where Japanese nurseries once stood tree-to-tree. And here, on the southern end of the Sawtelle Boulevard strip, is the Olympic Collection, an oddly posh agglomerate of glass, steel and polished marble that seems to house conference rooms and cheap Japanese eating places where you’d expect to find swank boutiques.

In a top corner of the Olympic Collection, up a grand escalator and past a line of people waiting to get in, you’ll find the noodle shop Mishima, which is at least as spare and elegant-looking as Katsu or even the Yamamoto room at Maxfield. Few noodle shops feature Zen rock gardens or mounted Dennis Hopper autographs; Mishima has both, as well as painfully beautiful winter-flower arrangements and an interesting display of big sticks. A giant, square communal-dining table in the center of the restaurant has as its centerpiece an amoeba-shaped glass platform that looks like something Isamu Noguchi might have done on a good day in the ‘50s.

Mishima might be kind of a heavy name for a Westside restaurant, carrying as it does intimations of gonzo jingoism and tortured personality crisis, four-volume novels and ritual seppuku , at least if the place is named after the late Japanese novelist. One supposes that if the noodles clumped together, Mishima’s chef might feel compelled to ritually disembowel himself in disgrace.

Like an Izozaki exterior or a Commes des Garcons suit, Mishima’s pasta is admirable for simplicity of line and elegance of execution, even if it doesn’t exactly thrill you. Pencil-thick udon noodles--thick, white worms--have the al dente “bite” of good Italian pasta, are slippery enough to elude your chopsticks three falls out of four, and have a solid, wheaty taste. Soba --thin, buckwheat noodles--are firmer, almost chewy, and have an earthy pungency of their own that sings through Mishima’s tart, clean soy broth. The ceramic bowls are pretty, too.

Most Japanese noodle shops, at least in Los Angeles, specialize in ramen , the garlicky, spaghetti-shaped, pork-brothy things that Japanese consider to be “Chinese” noodles, the stuff of greasy spoons. Mishima serves only udon and soba --the austere “Japanese” stuff--but many subtle variations thereof.

The house specialty, tanuki soba (or udon ), tempers the severity of the plain noodles-and-broth with tiny Rice Krispies puffs of fried tempura batter, and chikara soba (or udon ), that has gooey, grilled mochi rice cakes lurking in its depths. Curry soba (or udon ) is spiked with white-meat chicken and has its broth thickened with yellow Japanese curry, the mild, turmeric-heavy kind you find mantling curry rice at Japanese lunch counters.

Wakame udon is rich with the pungent iodine flavor of seaweed--it should be; a solid inch of kelp floats on the surface--and mentaiko udon includes a pink, thumb-shaped sac of spiced cod roe. There is the traditional zaru soba , chilled buckwheat noodles coiled on a bamboo mat, ready to be dipped in a saucer of chilled soy-citrus sauce, and a few variations on that theme. You could probably eat an entire bowl of any of them and ingest less fat than you would from eating a single French fry.

And there are plenty of fashionably minimal side dishes: fuzzy boiled soybean pods, from which you squeeze the tasty, bright-green beans; inari sushi , fried tofu pillows stuffed with rice and sweet pickled vegetables; onigiri , compacted rice cakes, three to an order, studded with bits of seaweed, pickled plum or the spicy shiso herb; ten don , fresh, crisp tempura over rice; and amazingly good sticks of fried fishcake, dusted with shredded, dried seaweed, that might get Mrs. Paul to thinking about seppuku herself.

Mishima, 11301 W. Olympic Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 473-5297. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Beer and wine. Validated lot parking. Takeout. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $9-$14.