Japanese Sleeper

Asanebo (“late riser”) is my favorite Valley Japanese restaurant. It’s not a sushi bar but a pub; mostly it serves kappo ryori, the little dishes designed to accompany beer, wine or hot sake.

A few items--buckwheat noodle soup, hearty porridges--are not kappo ryori but peasant dishes.

On the whole, though, this boxy, claustrophobic room crowded with narrow tables is a lot more like a real restaurant in Japan than Sushi Nozawa down the street. (To make the experience even a bit too authentic, brothers Shunji and Tetsu Nakao have nearly doubled their prices since they opened Asanebo several years back.)

The most spectacular dish I’ve tasted here recently is hirame usuzukuri, wafer-thin slices of halibut fanned out on your plate like flower petals, each kissed with grated yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit with an appealing lemon-lime flavor.

Asanebo also serves creamy, briny uni (sea urchin) sashimi. This can be a metallic and unappealing dish, but Asanebo’s version is the best I’ve tasted in years. It positively melts in your mouth.

One of Asanebo’s best dishes is something Japanese restaurants rarely serve in this country, despite its simplicity and almost universal appeal: Japanese eggplant with ground chicken sauce.

The thinly sliced pieces of eggplant are pan-seared and blanketed with finely minced chicken in a soy vinegar sauce. I’d think of this as Japanese kid food if it didn’t positively scream for an ice-cold brewski to go with it.

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The chefs also make one of the most tender filet mignons anywhere. It’s an ultra-trim piece of steak broiled with plenty of chopped garlic--a fairly unusual condiment in Japanese cookery, by the way.

I enjoyed the kitchen’s butter-soft sea eel tempura, but the batter lacked the magical lightness that you could expect in a first-class tempura restaurant in any major Japanese city.

Meanwhile, two quite everyday dishes, by Japanese pub standards, are expertly handled.

One is salmon skin roll, a crunchy cone of fried fish skin and nori seaweed filled with sweet smoked salmon and more fatty skin.

The other is egg zosui, a simple egg rice soup that Japanese men like to slurp up at the end of a long pub evening, in no small part to prevent hangovers.

And to turn them into late risers, which (who knows?) might be the point of a night at Asanebo, too.

BE THERE

Asanebo, 11941 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. Open nightly, 6 p.m-2 a.m. Beer and wine only. Parking in lot. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, $48-$85. Suggested dishes: salmon skin roll, $5; hirame usuzukuri, $14; uni sashimi, $15; filet mignon, $18; egg zosui, $7. Call (818) 760-3348.