Echo Park: Kushiba is both present on Sunset Boulevard and not on Sunset Boulevard. It’s adequately hidden in a suitable parking lot with outdoor seating that exact Waze had me going around the league on a front door snipe search. But once recompensed within, Kushiba delivers the sort of convenience found in izakaya stores down the alleyways of Tokyo. It’s a cafe where you can yield yourself in a chilly glass of craft sake, parched and crispy and delicate to a battered soul.
In a nutshell, “izakaya” guides to the planet of small dishes that run well with beer and sake. Along with this a shochu too, which is bent into a surfeit of cocktails here – shochu iced tea? How regarding a shochu lemon sour? In times of food, “izakaya” represents a menu of multiple small plates, cold and sizzling, grilled and fried. For those in demand of something more significant, there are hot pot stews. But mainly, there are “sticks.”
Putting jointly a feast at an izakaya is equal to completing a culinary jigsaw puzzle. Do the smelt sticks spread with a seaweed salt combination head with the Orion Okinawan Rice Lager? Can you also suggest some understated glass of Takashimizu Muroka Junmai Sake with the incredibly quirky potato salad with smoked eel? How around the grilled wieners and skewers of fried camembert? Is that also Japanese food?
Kushiba
The promising news is there’s a Chef’s Set of any five stakes with raw veggies for $20, facilitating at least one feed segment. Given a selection of five sticks out of 20, I chose the shrimp and the kabocha squash, the chicken wrapped in shiso, the shitake mushrooms, and the eggplant. I counted the assorted pickles, the diced raw fish, and the sliced chicken. I drink locally produced Sawtelle Sake because, well, be dedicated to your school.
The menu at Kushiba is both straightforward and loaded with clever and tasty twistings and turns. It’s also admirably empty of the same ancient age. There’s no edamame. Terms like teriyaki and tempura are not present anywhere. It’s odd to discover camembert on a skewer in an izakaya.
But then, it’s interesting to discover mochi as well. And flounder is a fish little discovered on the West Coast; does it even float in the waters near Japan? I appreciate how every table comes supplied with small, smart servers of sweet-salty tonkatsu sauce, the previous seaweed and salt mixture, and a sesame and mustard sauce. There’s coffee jelly with soft cream for sweet.
At the most suitable izakayas, a specific culinary eclecticism is named for, a readiness to combine this with that. To consume camembert with pork belly. Years back, at a feast in Kyoto, a dish that was so weird my friend wouldn’t even glance at it. I questioned my server if it was a dish of grilled tadpoles. She said, “Oh no, those are salamanders.” and yes this isn’t that bad.
