Mix Master

Sawtelle Kitchen serves fusion food, but it’s the reverse of the usual oh-so-clever fusion cookery--it’s a Japanese interpretation of Western cuisine. Order one of the imaginative pastas, such as spaghetti with spicy pollock roe and daikon sprouts, and the waitress plops a dinner roll alongside and brings sturdy cheese and chile shakers, as if you were in a down-home Italian cafe.

Even more telling is the chef--or is he the waiter, or the busboy? As restaurant manager and chef, Kenji Minamida from Tokyo tackles any job. The only badge of his craft is the white chef’s coat that he wears over blue jeans and sneakers. He is humbly delighted when you ask about a dish, as if this rarely happens.

Yet people wait outside for a table. They come because the food is good and amazingly cheap for the quality--$9 gets you half a grilled chicken with ginger sauce, potatoes and vegetables, rice or a roll. The ambience is young, lively and casual. The small, cramped dining room can be noisy with conversation and jazzy music. It’s more peaceful on the handkerchief-sized terrace.

Sawtelle Kitchen is located in West Los Angeles on--surprise--Sawtelle Boulevard. This is an old-time Japanese neighborhood. There’s a Japanese grocery nearby, a ramen place across the street and a Buddhist church a block or so west.

But go elsewhere on the street for sushi, sashimi and sukiyaki. The closest that Sawtelle Kitchen comes to that sort of food is the miso soup served with dinners or an appetizer of deep-fried chicken wings dipped in light teriyaki sauce. There is yellowtail, but it’s grilled. You eat it with citrus-flavored soy sauce mixed with shredded daikon.

Other dishes are totally Western, like the “six-hour” braised lamb shanks with demiglace sauce--an excellent dish, the meat falling off the bone, the demiglace tasting like rich stew juices. A grilled pork chop is more cross-cultural. It is bathed with so much spicy ginger sauce that you’ll probably upend your bowl of rice onto the plate to mix with the delicious juices.

Japanese meatloaf turns out to be the same as American meatloaf, only shaped differently. It’s a bulbous hamburger patty, rather than a loaf that could be sliced.

Dinner dishes come with French fries brightly seasoned with red chile powder, thick slices of carrot arranged as if they were logs in a Japanese garden, green beans and rice or a roll. It hardly makes sense to pay $2 more for a complete dinner, unless you’re set on having miso soup and a green salad.

The salad, seasoned with soy French dressing, is fine, but it’s more interesting to explore other options. There’s a mixture of greens and spicy beef that could be a light main dish. The beef is chewy and easier to eat with chopsticks, which are on every table, than with a fork.

There’s also a wonderful salad of thin daikon rounds topped with daikon sprouts and soy sauce-rice vinegar dressing. Or you could skip salad for a first course of hot fried yam slices to dip in plum mayonnaise--that’s mayonnaise seasoned with ume, the Japanese sour plum.

Ume and bright green shiso leaf are the only seasonings added to spaghetti in a dish of bare-bones simplicity. Shiso is strong, unrelated in flavor to any Western herb. Strewn across pasta, as in penne with tomatoes, eggplant and garlic, it’s eye-openingly different, but not discordant.

Instead of meat, fish and poultry, the menu has categories like curry and rice or breaded and deep-fried foods. Sauteed shrimp and mushroom curry is intensely spicy, the shrimp sitting like pale islands in a sea of dark brown sauce. The taste is only remotely like an Indian curry.

The breaded and deep-fried foods sound too heavy for my taste. If you are interested, they include calamari steak, pork loin, shrimp, red snapper and, would you believe, meatloaf, each served with miso soup and rice.

I’ll save my fat and calorie allotment for the desserts that are, to use a weary word, fabulous. One of them brought me here in the first place. A Korean American I met in another restaurant talked up the coffee gelatin topped with cappuccino ice cream. Now, who could resist that? It is, as he said, very good, the gelatin flavored with the house blend coffee.

But I lost my heart to a sweet potato, transformed into as unusual a dessert as you will find on the Westside. The potato is the satsuma, a sweet, white-fleshed tuber that looks like a yam. The pulp is mixed with butter, sugar, brandy and vanilla and packed back into the skin, then glazed with egg wash and browned under a salamander. A huge mound of whipped cream topped with chopped nuts comes on the side.

If that’s too substantial, try the green apple or lemon sorbets, just what you need to feel comfortable after a big dinner. Custard pudding turns out to be flan, a silky smooth rendition with deep caramel flavor and that same nut-topped whipped cream alongside.

The restaurant does not serve alcoholic beverages, so you’ll have to bring your own. Or you could settle for the fusionistic choice of coffee or herb tea.

BE THERE

Sawtelle Kitchen, 2024 Sawtelle Blvd., West Los Angeles; (310) 445-9288. Lunch noon to 2:30 p.m. Dinner 6 to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Closed Sunday. MasterCard, Visa; no alcohol; no reservations. Street parking. Dinner for two, food only, $12 to $26.

What to get: Pasta with tomato, Japanese eggplant, garlic and shiso; pasta with spicy pollock roe and daikon sprouts; six-hour braised lamb shanks, coffee gelatin with cappuccino ice cream; sweet potato, Japanese style.