Rising Sun Curry

There are more than 400 Indian restaurants in metropolitan Tokyo and at least 50 times that many--no kidding--that serve Japanese curry, a cheap filler food that verges on a national obsession. Nearly every street corner cafe sells Japanese curry. Glutinous masses of it are served in every school cafeteria and company canteen from Okinawa to Hokkaido. It’s as much a comfort food in Japan as any Japanese dish is.

To non-Japanese, it’s a culture-shock adventure in the idiosyncratic universe of the Japanese aesthetic. You can try a neatened-up version of it at the swell new Curry House in Beverly Hills.

Japan learned about curry from England about a hundred years ago. Because the English idea of curry was already a heavily edited version of Indian cooking ideas, what you have here is, needless to say, a very loose interpretation of the original curry concept. Physicists say that if all colors are mixed in equal proportions, the result is white. Japanese curry demonstrates that if you mix every spice you can think of, you end up with a thick, sweetish, oddly glazed brown sauce in which all the distinctive flavors have canceled each other out.

The Beverly Hills Curry House is the latest link in a five-restaurant chain that includes locations in Cypress, Gardena, Del Amo and Little Tokyo. The new location is by far the most attractive. Like Japanese curry itself, the ambience is an amalgam of elements that might not seem to belong together: frosted glass, a Japanese flower arrangement offset by a lacquered wooden backdrop, cobalt-blue Diva lights, cool jazz on the sound system and a team of waitresses who take care of you with disarming sincerity.

With your Japanese curry you have a choice of meats, the best being the breaded pork cutlet, a sort of schnitzel hacked into neat rectangular slices. There are also half a dozen other variations, including beef, chicken, vegetable and lightly battered fried shrimp, the last being a natural with Japanese curry sauce.

Then there’s something the menu calls German curry. For this dish, the curry sauce is garnished with about a dozen perfectly cut baby carrots, a like number of boiled string beans and a wiener that appears to have been pressed down onto a heated colander. Somehow it emerges from cooking with bumps dotted all over its surface, making it look like a New Age foot massager. Welcome to Planet Japan.

Oddly, if you don’t choose a curry dish, Curry House is a very good medium-priced restaurant and far more Japanese than the famous Matsuhisa three doors away. You can get a number of dishes that are eaten all over Japan, though they aren’t exactly what we think of as Japanese, like a spicy omelet filled with a chicken pilaf dosed with flaked red peppers.

Or Japanese spaghetti dishes, which have wonderfully eccentric toppings. Shimeji and kaiware spaghetti sounds bizarre at first, but the delicate oyster mushrooms and the sharp radish sprouts complement each other beautifully. Tarako and ika spaghetti makes good use of salty cod roe and squid, a Japanese take on the Italian bottarga. Curry House’s spaghetti Bolognese isn’t bad, either.

The beefy hamburger steak, served on a sizzling iron plate, is blanketed in your choice of teriyaki, cheese, white or curry sauce. Another option is the Japanese dinner boxes, of which the best is una-ju, a huge portion of broiled sea eel on a bed of perfectly cooked rice, with miso soup and Japanese pickles on the side.

Don’t leave without taking a crack at coffee and dessert, a Western custom that the Japanese have refined into an art all their own. This may be the best cup of coffee on the street, a strong, assertive blend of Yemen Mocha, Java and French roast.

The best dessert is, I swear, tofu cheesecake. If I hadn’t been told this was made from tofu, I’d have thought it was based on an extra-delicate ricotta.

Oh, and did I mention that the coffee service includes heavy cream and rock candy syrup, both poured from elegant little glass vessels? That’s exactly how they do it in Tokyo.

But of course, a good cup of coffee is about $7 there. The same money would get you two dishes of Japanese curry in Tokyo--twice as much as you’d need, or perhaps want, for a food adventure.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

WHERE TO GO

Curry House, 163 N. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills; (310) 854- 4959. Open 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 11:30 a.m.-10:30 p.m. Friday, noon-10:30 p.m. Saturday, noon-10 p.m. Sunday. Beer and wine only. Validated parking in adjacent lot. All major credit cards. Takeout. Dinner for two, $18-$30.

WHAT TO GET

Cutlet curry, spicy omelet rice, shimeji and kaiware spaghetti, hamburger steak, tofu cheesecake.