Fish Masters

The best single restaurant in town is undoubtedly Sushi-Ko, the understated sushi bar in Beverly Hills as famous for its above-the-line clientele as it is for its meaty sashimi of hamo , for its delicate sauces of Japanese herbs and white miso , for its hand-carved toothpicks of rare Japanese wood. The last meal I had there had as its centerpiece a four-course exploration of fugu , the fabled and potentially poisonous blowfish of Japan, and when things threatened to get fatally exquisite, out came a waiter with a straw basketful of Southern-fried blowfish, folded into a red-and-white checked napkin.

My wife and I were the only people in the restaurant. It was the best meal either of us has ever eaten. The bill? Let’s call it dinner for two with wine at Chez Panisse, with airfare, hotel and rental car.

The essential problems with Sushi-Ko are: 1) It is too expensive to visit more than once a decade or so; and 2) the restaurant is so superior of its type that I eat a lot less sushi than I used to. When a restaurateur charges that kind of money, he can afford to buy some pretty good fish.

But for years, I have been going to the sushi bar Shibucho, in both its informal location just east of Koreatown for salted plum hand rolls at 3 in the morning, and in its elegant incarnation in Yaohan Plaza near downtown for leisurely sashimi lunch. There are a lot of sushi bars in town, but the Shibuchos are about the most traditional: no tempura, no loud music, no spicy tuna rolls. Shibucho never used to seem cheap, but you can eat nine or 10 sushi dinners here for the price of one at Sushi-Ko.

Smoking in restaurants has been illegal for a while, but the Beverly Boulevard Shibucho still feels like a smoke-filled room, filled with Japanese businessmen, crowds of expats and students, also the hipper brand of record-company executive, well fortified with alcohol, eating mountains of Dungeness crab, treating the sushi bar like . . . a bar. (If you’re not a regular, you can sometimes feel like an extra on “Cheers.”) Presumably flush with yen, half the bar was sluicing down its sushi with first-rate red Bordeaux the last time I was in.

The snacky kinds of sushi are superb here, salmon-skin hand rolls sharp with pungent gobo root, sushi rolls stuffed with Japanese pickles, sushi of sweet shrimp. And the sashimi is very fine, artful even: streaky slices of fat tuna; rich, little clams; cool slabs of ankimo (monkfish liver) that is more or less the foie gras of the sea.

But the Little Tokyo Shibucho is the dream sushi bar of Mr. Shibuya, conceivably the best pure sushi chef in town, a man who has the gift of touching a fish with his knife and not so much cutting as liberating it from its form, as if the flesh had willed itself all along to fall into irregular slabs.

A fairly high percentage of California sushi-bar employees trained with Shibuya, and a meal here can sometimes seem a little like lunch at a hotel school, as Shibuya scolds in Japanese a waitress for assuming an incorrect posture while serving tea, a chef for improperly filleting a mackerel. A sushi master simultaneously assumes the duties of chef, maitre d’, restaurant manager and headwaiter, and Shibuya does it all.

There are set-price sushi lunches served at tables here, inexpensive enough to lure plaza shoppers away from the noodle shops and the pork cutlet specialty restaurants, but it is a pleasure to sit at the sushi bar in the early afternoon and watch Shibuya work.

Lunch may start with a tangle of seaweed, like salty black vermicelli, spiked with cubes of fish, then a small bowl of cubed tofu sauced with a sharp, fragrant puree.

Dictate sashimi, and Shibuya may assemble a miniature Noguchi sculpture of tuna, then halibut, then meaty grilled shiitake mushrooms served with a tart dipping sauce. Pale-pink salmon is marbled so beautifully, so regularly that the fish almost looks fabricated from the kind of striped silk used to upholster Regency chairs. Squid, slightly cooked, falls apart in two strands, fine as fettuccine, its natural toughness tamed, and a creamy sweetness brought to the fore. Lovely bits of firm albacore, seared at the edges and raw within, explode into sweet juice.

Point to something odd in the cold case, and Shibuya blushes, then lifts out a luminous aspic that looks like whitebait trapped in amber.

“Fish Jell-O,” he says, sliding a cube of the stuff onto your plate. He shrugs. “People like to eat it when they drink sake.”

What to Get: Sushi, sashimi

Where to Go: Shibucho, 333 S. Alameda St., Top Floor, Los Angeles, (213) 626-1184. Dinner daily. Lunch Monday through Saturday. Beer and wine. Validated parking. American Express, Visa and MasterCard accepted. Lunch or dinner for two, food only, $12 to $60. Also at 3144 W. Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 387-8498.