Restaurant: Hamasaku
Location: 11043 California Route 2, Los Angeles, CA 90025. (310) 479-7636
Date: July 10, 2017
Cuisine: Japanese
Rating: good but not great sushi
Larry and I met up for our regular lunch at one of my OLD (I mean 2006 haunts):
Hamasaku. Founded originally by Mike Ovitz, I used to eat here with my partners in the early Flektor days. It was fairly innovative at the time, if slightly over-emphasizing the “rolls” (never been a roll fan, preferring nigiri).
The current menu. We got the lunch Omakase which is much cheaper and shorter than it was back in 2006.
6pcs of sashimi. Well, if you consider a sliver of octopus a piece. It was good quality fish though, with some yellowtail and toro too.
Mizuma salad. This had bits of fish cake in there too. I wasn’t a huge fan of the green texture, tickled my throat.
Monkfish karage. I like a crunchier tempura fry than this more “deep fry.” The fish was good, but the overall effect was a touch heavy.
Miso soup.
8pcs nigiri. I don’t love when nigiri comes out on a plate all at once like this. There are a lot of the whitefish in here, hard to identify after the fact. It was solid but nothing amazing.
Faroe Island Salmon and Toro sushi. These were better, quite nice actually. But they were special orders not part of the omakase.
Fox hand roll. Snow crab legs, dynamite sauce, tempura crunch. Just the sort of warm “new style roll” I was talking about at the start — tasty enough though.
Mochi ice cream. Coffee and cookies?
Overall, I remember Hamasaku as better and more innovative than I found today, although this was certainly a decent lunch and pretty decent value as sushi goes. It’s not bad at all, but there are more to my taste (i.e. either more modernist or more traditionalist) places in town. This is sort of a lonely middle-ground sushi, somewhere in the center of the quadrant of innovative, traditional, trendy (like Nobu), and populist (rolls) — drawing from each corner, but not really belonging to any.
Amusingly, two of my former Ramen Roll employees are working here now — and it’s nice to see they have good gigs (it’s certainly upscale from RnR).