KATSU: FOOD PREPARED BY AN ARTIST

Katsu, 1972 Hillhurst Ave., Los Angeles. Reservations essential: 665-1891. Open for lunch Monday-Friday, and daily for dinner. Beer and wine. Valet parking. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, $25-$60 (food only). There is a sushi chef in Ginza who stubbornly refuses to talk to the customers. He engages in a sort of silent duel with the eater, making it his business to remember what you like from one visit to the next. If he serves you well, he wins.

That Ginza sushi bar is one of the restaurants my friend Nori insisted that I visit when I went to Tokyo last year. Nori was so worried that I would pick the wrong restaurants that he went through an entire Japanese guidebook, carefully translating and circling the reviews of the places he thought I ought to know about. “The must!” he would note enthusiastically about a restaurant noted for its gari (pickled ginger). Another “must!” was the first restaurant to serve the nigiri style of sushi. Nigirizushi , the little bite-sized pieces we all think of as sushi in this country, was invented in 1818; until then, the dominant style was oshizushi , marinated rice and fish pressed into long molds and then sliced. If I wanted oshizushi , said Nori, I should go to a restaurant he knew of that was opened in 1911 by one of the emperor’s former chefs.

Nori also thought I should visit the first actual sushi bar . “Until the great earthquake of 1910,” he informed me, “all sushi chefs and customers performed their duties in the sitting position.” The original sushi bar, Nori added, was also notable for the quality of its seaweed, which comes only from the Tokyo Bay. “It’s crisper than ordinary seaweed,” Nori said with a touch of civic pride. Other “musts!” were a restaurant specializing in pickled sushi wrapped in bamboo leaves and one that served steamed chirashizushi (scattered style)--but only between December and March.

All this information was enough to convince me that there was more to sushi than I had previously expected. But that was only the beginning. Once I actually got to Tokyo, I discovered a sushi bar that specialized in tropical fish, and another that still serves the ancient “dancing fish.” (My impulse is not to define this any further, but if you must know, you go to a tank and choose one of the lovely creatures flitting through the water. The waitress sticks in a net and flops the fish down in front of the sushi chef. With a few swift passes of the knife, he fillets one side and spreads the sashimi out on top of the still-moving fish. When you’ve eaten that, you are brought the skin in a salad, the other side of the fish made into a soup, and finally the head, baked. It may make you feel better to know that it is enormously expensive.)

I had cheap sushi too--all over the country--and I discovered that far from being the precious experience that it so often is here, sushi is really rather rollicking food, sold in every train station. You see people sitting on buses eating sushi with their fingers, and stopping at little street stands to down a few slices. There are working-class sushi bars and upper-class sushi bars, but with all of that, I never found a sushi bar that was quite like Katsu, which is right here in Los Angeles.

There is nothing ordinary about Katsu. The spare arrangement of rocks that surrounds the door serves as an announcement that you are about to cross the threshold of a slightly different world. The small dining room makes none of the ordinary concessions to the American impression of Japan; there is no cedar, no little touches of blue. There is no tatami room either, and the chefs do not line up and bark at you as you walk in and out. The overall impression, in fact, is rather quiet. There are simple tables, plain black chairs, and the typical glass case to hold the fish. But on one wall is an enormous modern painting, two polka-dotted men confronting one another, and on the other, a sort of abstract cyclone, a swirl of red on a gray background that is one of the most compelling paintings I have ever seen. This is not the decorative art of a restaurateur who wants to make his place look pretty; this is strong stuff.

There is a certain poetry to high-class Japanese food that few Westerners take the time to understand. In this rarefied realm, every aspect of a meal has meaning. Where you eat is important, what you eat on even more so. A meal at one of the great Kaiseki restaurants of Japan can easily cost $400 per person; this is not only because you eat extravagant food--but also because you eat off antique plates. Japanese magazines occasionally run articles about how this restaurant dries its plates with silk cloths, or that one stores them in cedar boxes. Katsu Michite makes no such claims, but his platters, which were made by artist Mineo Mizuno, deserve to be wrapped in silk.

The platters may be beautiful, but the food that goes on top of them is even more so. Sit at one of the tables, order from the printed list (which circumvents the language problem so often encountered at sushi bars), and you will get wonderfully fresh fish artfully arranged on one of the platters, or draped across handsome slabs of marble. But sitting at the sushi bar one recent night, watching Katsu carefully cutting a meal for a special customer, I saw artistry of a different sort. It was the kind of food poetry that the Japanese generally reserve for only their most elegant restaurants.

First the chef bowed, and then he began to examine the case of fish in front of him. He picked up a large daikon, and carefully carved it into a long, continuous strip. Into this, he laid some lightly smoked salmon, rolled it up and then sliced it into little rounds that looked like pinwheels.

Now he sliced soft yellow pickled daikon into another strip, laid some soft green cucumber inside and wrapped it up. He carved little baskets out of lemons, filling them with delicate strips of tender squid and tiny little dots of pickled cod roe. Each piece was laid carefully onto celadon plates, along with a little square of baked egg with crabmeat, and then handed across the counter. They were so beautiful you felt that you could eat them with your eyes.

This is food to savor, to eat slowly. Meanwhile, Katsu took out a plump, shiny fish, a whole yellowtail, and began deliberately carving the fillets. He lovingly took down some long white platters that looked as if waves were rippling across them, and began arranging little tangles of shredded daikon, and piles of ruffly light green seaweed across the top. He was working deliberately as he grated a slender root of wasabi, the color of pistachios, into a paste to pile upon the platter. Fresh wasabi is not as hot as the powdered kind, but it is far more flavorful; the Japanese call this flavor namida, tears.

Like an artist working with paints, Katsu chose, sliced and arranged his ingredients. First some fresh, clear-tasting giant clam, then some delicate fluke muscle. He cut maguro , deep red tuna, into strips and fanned it out with his fingers; these he rolled up so that they sat upright, like floppy tulips on the plate. He did the same with the yellowtail, that sweet, rich-tasting fish. He diced Spanish mackerel, and laid it upon little leaves of lettuce. Choosing the sweetest, tiniest scallops, he mixed them with little bits of roe. He contemplated his work for a moment, then passed the platters across the counter, as if to say, “This is my art. For you.”

Next came little pots of chawan mushi , the most comforting of all Japanese foods. This steamed, unsweetened custard, mildly flavored with a briny stock, is wonderful when it is well made. Each time you stick your spoon into the little covered pot you come up with a surprise--a whole shrimp, little bits of chicken, small golden ginko nuts, a thin slice of fish tied into a bow.

As we ate Katsu was chopping toro , fatty tuna belly. This was buttery and almost white, entirely different than the maguro we had eaten earlier. To cut the richness he rolled the fish into a thin roll of crinkly seaweed, so there was a counterpoint between the soft, sweet fish and the crisp salty, vegetable. Black and white striped plates emphasized the contrast.

The last course arrived on blocks of clear resin that looked exactly like ice. It was the most refreshing-looking food I have ever seen; the impression of cold was so powerful that the slices of kiwi, orange and pineapple actually tasted icy.

This truly is food as art, and Katsu clearly understands this. In the next few weeks, he plans to enlarge the restaurant by cutting through the wall into the space next door. Asked if this is so he can put in more tables, Katsu looked taken aback. “Oh no,” he said quickly, gesturing around the room to the small entrance way where people were waiting to be seated. “It is just that it is too crowded in here.” It occurred to me that like the silent duel, this attitude is what separates the artist from the businessman.