RESTAURANT REVIEW : Cooking at Inaka: ‘Big With Life’

The word “macrobiotic” comes from the Greek term for life-extending. A chef at the restaurant Inaka explains the word in a more philosophical way: He says it means “Big (macro) with Life (bio).”

Inaka’s macrobiotic cooking is based on a number of principles: Eating seasonally. Eating regionally. Balancing the yin and the yang in foods--more specifically, balancing sodium and potassium intake. For example, there is an emphasis on sea vegetables because, as the chef puts it, the potassium/sodium balance in a human being is exactly the same as in Mother Ocean.

Preparing well-balanced, life-supporting foods, the chef says, is a kind of public service.

Walking into Inaka took me back to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when, it seemed, more people were seeking a purer, less material path through life.

Inaka, established in 1976, never strayed off that quieter path. As a restaurant, it couldn’t be more modestly appointed. There are mismatched chairs, pink tablecloths with paper place mats. The carpet is gray. A stalk of greenery sits in a bud vase at each table. A philodendron stem grows along the window molding like an electrical cord.

In short, it feels like somebody’s home, or, more accurately, like the dining room of some utopian cooperative. Families come here. We watched two young women from different tables strike up a friendship. We also saw vestigial hippies, professorial women and men, a few rock-star types. Tattoos, miniskirts, goatees, wire-rimmed glasses, full beards, Birkenstocks.

I would describe the low-fat, non-dairy cooking as: Japanese/macrobiotic/with fish. The menu is fairly small. The (smaller) lunch and (larger) dinner portions are available at all times. All portions are generous.

The Inaka plate may be ordered a la carte or with soup or salad and comes in three sizes: lunch, small and large. As a lunch-sized person with a respectable capacity, I was overwhelmed by the small-size portion. The plate held a colorful, attractive combination of vegetables, pickles and seaweed around a mound of chewy brown rice. The vegetables included greens marinated in tahini and white miso , juicy black seaweed and kabocha pumpkin, whose dense dark orange meat is slightly chalky but curiously pleasurable. There were also lightly sauced steamed carrots, celery, Jerusalem artichokes, parsnips and tsukemono pickles (cabbage), onions, daikon and other vegetables cured in fermented rice bran and salt.

The miso soup is light and healthy-tasting; the vegetable-bean soup is seriously, ponderously nutritious. The house salad is a bowl of crisp romaine leaves and a few strips of vegetables with a sesame dressing that is especially lively and refreshing.

“Wok Fry” vegetables is a bland, lightly sauteed combo of onions, peppers, cabbage and carrots, served with or without rice on the side. Snappier flavors abound in the yakisoba, Japanese-style chow mein noodles. Little chunks of tasty sauteed tofu can be added to the plate.

The spaghetti is a precise replication of the dish I’ve had in so many commune kitchens: fresh-made tomato sauce on buckwheat noodles. No Parmesan in sight, although wobbly cubes of lightly steamed tofu can be added for texture and protein.

Japanese-style vegetable pots, yosenabes , are heavy little iron buckets of broth and vegetables. The simple soups are bland, even after adding the accompanying grated daikon, green onion and fresh lemon, but there is a certain purifying pleasure about them.

Still, I preferred the vegetable pot, nabeyaki , with buckwheat noodles and heightened seasoning.

The seafood plates are sumptuous and colorful. Two lovely wedges of salmon were fresh and juicy and maybe just a trifle more cooked than I prefer, but certainly not cooked to dryness. Similarly, many good, fresh, large sauteed scallops swam in a tasty teriyaki sauce, and while they weren’t dry, they could have benefited from a little less time in the pan.

Desserts are made without dairy, without eggs and without sugar. Not to worry. Fruit sauce or maple syrup are fine sweeteners, and the date bars are as chewy and sweet as any you’d want. I loved the peach pie, its crust clumsily fashioned, its tart fruit unpeeled, perhaps picked from a local back yard tree. It was pie a mother or friend would make, a pie that despite its modest demeanor was made purely with affection, to be eaten in quiet celebration of peaches, summer companionship and the bigness of life.

Inaka, 131 S . La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 936-9353. Lunch Monday through Saturday, dinner seven nights. No alcohol served. No credit cards accepted. Metered street parking. Dinner for two, food only, $20 to $43.