Quite a Catch

Maeda is a chic, spare place fronted by a striking row of horsetail ferns, those living fossils from the Carboniferous Period. Otherwise, it looks like most of the dozen other Japanese restaurants located within a mile on Ventura Boulevard: Japanese prints, clean architectural lines, lots of blond wood. You can sit in a back room, by the front window or at the 12-seat sushi bar.

It’s an unusually good restaurant. Soon after you sit down, you get a specials blackboard advertising various fresh fish and an entire array of cold premium sakes, the bracing Kikusui being one.

The best dish here (and one of the priciest) is halibut ikizukuri, though there’s a certain amount of deception to it. “Ikizukuri” refers to fish that was alive just before serving.

This isn’t actually the case here, but the wafer-thin slices of fish are meltingly fresh.

Monkfish liver (ankimo) is served sushi-fashion, wrapped in nori seaweed--quite unusual.

“Spicy” tuna is very fresh but scarcely spicy. This restaurant does an especially good job on yaki nasu, eggplant roasted with sea salt, shaved bonito flakes and shredded nori.

Chef Maeda makes a mean salmon-skin salad, a huge pile of greens mixed with a delicate sesame oil dressing and loaded with crisp bits of salmon skin--long strips with firm pieces of pink flesh clinging to them.

One of his best cooked dishes is gindara misoyaki--chunks of flaky black cod marinated in miso paste and then broiled at high heat until blackened. One of the least interesting is chicken teriyaki, in a cloying soy sauce.

Watching Maeda-san at work, you admire his skill, but the service can be a bit slow here. One evening, we waited more than 45 minutes for two simple sushis: freshwater eel and sea urchin (admittedly, both were quite good).

On another occasion, the back kitchen took quite a while making the shrimp tempura for a tempura hand roll.

Still and all, this is one of the best sushi bars on the Boulevard, definitely worth noticing even for those who aren’t up on their ancient plants.

BE THERE

Maeda, 11622 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. Lunch Tuesday-Friday, 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m.; dinner Tuesday-Sunday, 5:30-10 p.m. Street parking. Beer and wine. American Express, MasterCard and Visa. Dinner for two, $33-$55. Suggested dishes: yaki nasu, $4.95; monkfish liver sushi, $4.95; salmon-skin salad, $7.95; halibut ikizukuri, $11.95. Call (818) 623-7888.