Let’s Do Sushi

Sushi Ko is probably a better restaurant than it needs to be. Located in the hills almost halfway between Los Angeles and Sherman Oaks--which makes it the ideal entertainment-industry meeting place--it’s the only sushi bar for miles around.

The server will hand you a picture menu and a long sushi list, but most of the best dishes are written on a pair of blackboards between the front entrance and the sushi bar. When toro is available, for instance, this place serves it as magnificent sashimi: smooth, buttery slices of velvet-red tuna belly.

Good sushi choices include kampachi (a fish in the halibut family), delicately tangy sea urchin (uni) and wonderfully flavorful, exquisitely textured sea eel (unagi, served partly cooked). Among the hand rolls, I especially love the one called salmon skin roll, which provides three types of salty crunch with every bite.

There are plenty of cooked dishes, too. What the menu calls butterfish is really broiled black cod (gindara) marinated in miso. It’s my favorite fish here.

If you don’t like fish, there’s a delightful appetizer called burnt chicken--pieces of chicken that magically remain moist though grilled almost black.

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Lots of regulars favor a salmon scallop special that isn’t even listed on the blackboards. It’s eight or nine small rounds of steamed salmon, each tasty piece rolled around a fresh scallop and a sweet shiso leaf. The unjustly renowned dish called “dynamite” is seafood mixed with mayonnaise, baked in a scallop shell and topped with flying-fish roe.

The specials are worth checking out, but there are no guarantees. One evening I had some exhilaratingly fresh soft-shell crabs, fried just until crisp. But another special that evening, tuna poke, was a disappointment.

In Hawaii, poke (pronounced POH-kay) is raw fish marinated with sesame oil, green onions, seaweed and perhaps rice vinegar, but Sushi Ko’s poke is unseasoned slices of raw tuna stacked on tostada-shaped wonton crisps. That, my friends, is an architecturally sound but gastronomically bland conception.

Most seating is at proper tables with white tablecloths, but if you want to have a conversation in this very noisy place, take the long, U-shaped sushi counter. And who knows? You may make an important contact here--if you can hear each other.

BE THERE

Sushi Ko, 2932 1/2 Beverly Glen Circle, Bel-Air. Lunch noon-2:30 p.m. Monday-Friday; dinner 5:45-10:45 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 5:45-11:45 p.m. Friday-Saturday. Parking in lot. Beer and wine only. All major cards. Dinner for two, $35-$75. Suggested dishes: salmon skin roll, $5; butterfish, $10; toro sushi (seasonal) $12.50; burnt chicken appetizer, $9.50. Call (310) 475- 8689.