Restaurant: Hannosuke
Location: 3760 S Centinela Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90066. (310) 397-4676
Date: March 9, 2015 & February 26, 2016
Cuisine: Japanese Tempura
Rating: Darn good fried stuff
Inside the Mitsuwa Japanese marketplace in Mar Vista is a little mini Japanese food court. I’ve been in the supermarket, but not in a long time, and I guess the food court is either new (10 years new) or I didn’t notice it back then.
You can see the whole swath of the store.
Hannosuke is famous for its tempura bowls. For those that don’t know, tempura is egg fried battered stuff. A technique brought to Japan by the Portuguese in the 17th century, but perfected by the Japanese.
Here is some verbiage about the place.
And the simple menu.
I ordered the deluxe #2. It includes the giant fried chunk of Anago, which is a rare and delicious specialty.
Here is the whole plate, plus two extra shrimp.
Miso soup. The usual.
#2 tempura bowl. Fried shrimp, conger eel, shisito pepper, seaweed, some boiled egg, and kakiage. The tempura is perfectly crispy/soggy, a specialty of this type. The sauce is pre-applied here. The kakiage was an odd mix of shrimp and vegetables, but was delicious. The anago (eel) was rich and flaky. All sorts of fried goodness. The seaweed had a nice crunch.
Giant shrimp. Two of the classics. Pretty much as good as this gets.
Extra eel and kakiage (it’s so good!).
Hot buckwheat soba.
Cold buckwheat soba.
Over at a different place I grabbed this sweet custard.
It was fine but a little heavy. There was some loose “caramel” underneath.
They also had this oddball. I should try it. Spicy curry donut! UPDATE: tried one a couple weeks later. It’s not really sweet, but basically a bread filled with Japanese curry. Kinda odd.
And some of the other plastic foods at the other places in here. Typical bowls of udon/soba curry, etc.
And more.
And a ramen joint.
All in all, this is some great tempura, and I have to come back and try some udon or curry noodles too. Fun little “mini Japan” not far from our official Sawtelle Japantown.