A Chef With Sushi Savvy

our waitress clears two places at the sushi bar just in front of the door when the slender Katsu Michite emerges from behind the hanging cloths that screen the kitchen from view. He bows in welcome. Next to us, three yahoos are knocking back sake. “Maestro,” one of them calls out a little too loudly to get the chef’s attention. Katsu nods. He knows what they want: standard sushi and pretty hand rolls. And that’s what he gives them.

We, on the other hand, ask for omakase (chef’s choice). This is, I’m convinced, the best strategy at Katsu 3rd. After all, if you’re lucky enough to have a master sushi chef such as Katsu on the other side of the counter, why not let him do what he does best, no holds barred? Besides, I like the surprise of not knowing what’s next.

I remember the first time I ate at Katsu’s original Hillhurst Avenue restaurant, Katsu, a decade ago. I was entranced by his knife work and the exquisite presentation on beautiful handmade ceramic platters. His little salads of seafood and seaweed could take your breath away with their finely honed balance of flavors. The quality of the fish was astonishing. The restaurant’s spare decor was as avant garde as the Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto or Rei Kawakubo designs on the backs of many of its diehard fans. A seat at the sushi bar was as hard to get as a window seat at Spago. Later, Katsu opened Cafe Katsu on Sawtelle Boulevard, a little Franco-Japanese place that has been gone for several years.

When Katsu 3rd opened in 1990, it seemed the least interesting of Katsu’s restaurants. It was a plain box of a room across from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and next door to Locanda Veneta. The menu offered salads, tempura, teriyaki, fixed-price dinners and, of course, sushi. Without the pretensions or the elevated prices of the original restaurant, this one was more an everyday place, casual and upbeat, with a strong lunch business.

Katsu 3rd is where you can find Katsu most nights. He still owns the Hillhurst restaurant and, after he goes to the fish market in Little Tokyo in the early morning, he stops there to deliver the seafood. But if you want him to make you sushi, you have to come here. A carved wooden fish over the door is the only sign. The interior is stark: white walls, no windows, only a horizontal indentation, hard chairs, a flower arrangement of twisted branches.

By ordering yourself, you can get a pretty salad of squid strips, seaweed and sweet rice vinegar-marinated cucumbers. Or one of cool soba, or buckwheat noodles, piled with enoki and shiitake mushrooms, daikon sprouts and burdock. And bowls of rich, salty miso soup, decent tempura and teriyaki, as well as the standard array of sashimi and sushi.

Or you can let Katsu show what he can do. His style is sophisticated and low-key. You won’t find the noisy showmanship of Matsuhisa’s sushi chefs, who yell out and engage customers in conversation. Katsu will talk or he won’t, depending on your mood. It’s comfortable either way.

One night, he begins with a salad of fleshy seaweed, crunchy Japanese cucumbers scattered with sesame seeds and wonderfully flavorful lump crab meat topped with the green crab butter. Then come velvety chunks of grilled fresh shiitake with a hauntingly sweet aftertaste and seared, very rare albacore topped with sharp grated ginger and a sweet miso sauce.

We notice a collection of empty wine bottles to the right of the bar, so crowded together that it’s hard to read the labels, but I do recognize a 1990 Vosne-Romanee Clos Parentoux from Burgundy’s legendary vintner Henri Jayer. Who’s been drinking that? I wonder. “Oh, those are from a customer who always brings his own wines,” Katsu explains. “I like the bottles, so I keep them there.”

A trio of nigiri-sushi follows: perfect ovals of pearly-grained rice topped with dark-fleshed sardine and a little pile of grated radish; opalescent mackerel with the kick of fresh wasabi; and oily Spanish mackerel played against the sharp green of shiso. After, the chef offers a clear fish soup in which a few bites of Japanese eggplant and baby bok choy float.

And then he hands us a roll of crisped nori. Wary, I take a bite--no avocado or mayonnaise, thankfully. It’s delicious, filled with the sour crunch of pickled radish, starchy taro root, a little toro (fatty tuna belly) and shiso leaf.

On another night, when we interrupt Katsu’s dinner in the kitchen, the chef gives a more perfunctory performance. Fried calamari with lemon is good with cold Kirin beer. And pale, satiny halibut sashimi and mauve ruffled seaweed draped over a bowl of ice accompanied by a yuzu-drenched ponzu sauce is just what we need on this unseasonably hot night. We eat it slowly, savoring each soothing bite. Then he passes us a plate of superb yellowtail sashimi arranged with buttery marbled toro, peppery daikon sprouts and dark emerald seaweed that tastes of the cool depths of the sea. He has a definite way with mushrooms, too: a mix of shiitake, shimeji (oyster) and enoki are as satisfying as any steak. But the thick slices of sauteed monkfish liver on the same plate are just too rich for temperatures this warm. One slice I can manage, but three? Sushi of unagi (grilled eel) in a dark, sweet glaze tempered with ribbons of shiso, however, tastes exactly right.

So does dessert, a platter of fruit as carefully arranged as any Dutch still life. Ah, I forgot the honeydew, he says, adding a wedge of perfectly ripe melon dripping with juice.

Like any artist, Katsu’s secret is in knowing when to stop. He never gives you too much. Or too little

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KATSU 3RD

CUISINE: Japanese. AMBIENCE: Sushi bar and restaurant with stark decor. BEST DISHES: sashimi, sushi, crab salad with cucumbers, fish soup, grilled shiitake mushrooms. FACTS: 8636 W. 3rd St., Los Angeles; (310) 273-3605. Lunch Monday through Friday; dinner Monday through Saturday. Sushi, $3 to $9; sashimi, $3 to $14. Dinner for two, $60 to $80. Corkage: $5. Valet parking.