The tinted glass entrance to Budonoki, which faces the intersection of Melrose and Virgil avenues, doesn’t so much mirror its surroundings as stare back blankly. Only blurred streaks of neon seep from inside through the blackened windows. Open the door, and for a moment the sensation is nearly the same.
Before your eyes adjust to the darkness, you inhale scents of grilling meat and brace against the waves of sound: competing voices raised to near-shouting, a playlist that will segue through Frank Ocean, OutKast, Destiny’s Child and the Pointer Sisters.
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As the pupils dilate enough to take in the room’s major details — a bar angled along the left wall, paper lanterns across the ceiling, fluorescent purple and reddish-pink lighting that more recalls the curated glow of “Blade Runner 2049” than the original film — a staffer will walk up to ask if you’ve made a reservation. People sitting along the industrial-blue booths likely will be wriggling between tightly spaced tables to reach their spots. They probably don’t mind. High spirits fizz in the air. The mood can lull you into a happy place that felt far away even five minutes ago, after scouring the neighborhood for parking.
Oshizushi, or pressed sushi, with aburi salmon.
Budonoki’s sign lights up the night.
In moments, someone is pouring water and asking what you’d like to drink: an icy sake cocktail, or a straight-up glass of seasonal daiginjo as crisp and floral as springtime? One of several Japanese beers on draft? A zero-proof ume soda? Thoughts turn to the menu, nearly two dozen options mostly categorized as “snacks.” It’s a collection of hand rolls, crudo, riffs on noodles and pastas, mountainous salads and charred meats in herbal, soy-sharpened sauces that food-focused Angelenos will find familiar, even if the dishes don’t usually appear in this exact mix or under the same roof.
Budonoki is where club meets pub, a raucous scene that never loses sight of its essence as a neighborhood restaurant.
Open since late September, the operation’s swiftly achieved balance of hospitality and adept cooking demonstrates its partners’ depth of experience. Front-of-house aces Eric Bedroussian and Josh Hartley have, between them, Hillstone Restaurant Group, Majordomo, Chicago’s Alinea Group and Helen’s Wines at Jon & Vinny’s on their résumés. In the fast, personable service one can sense efficient corporate systems merged with a deliberate individualist streak; no one here comes off as robotized, yet servers manage to maintain their focus in a party-down atmosphere.
Chef Dan Rabilwongse grew up in Echo Park, blocks from Budonoki’s corner location in rapidly changing Virgil Village. He cooked at some of L.A.’s most ambitious restaurants — Urasawa and Bouchon, both closed, and current guiding lights Hayato and Tsubaki — before teaming with Bedroussian and Hartley. They began Budonoki as a pop-up, including appearances at Tsubaki’s next-door sibling Ototo and at Melody a two-minute walk away on Virgil. Rabilwongse honed soon-to-be menu staples like soriresu yakitori (grilled chicken oysters), painted with fragrant galangal sauce, and salmon oshizushi, the rectangular pressed sushi that’s a favorite in Vancouver, Bedroussian’s hometown.
In its more permanent form, the partners brand Budonoki as an izakaya. I love what the place is bringing to our dining town. I keep taking different friends here; we feel, if not euphoric about life (a tall order at this juncture of humanity), certainly less strained than when we arrived. Rabilwongse and chef de cuisine Justin Vu surgically splice their respective Thai and Vietnamese backgrounds into Japanese-inspired drinking foods. The results feel innate to their talents and to Los Angeles.
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Is Budonoki truly an izakaya? Does it have that organically scruffy, swing-by-after-work, not-quite-a-bar-but-not-quite-a-restaurant third-space vibe? Nah. But labels are fluid by default in Los Angeles, and the original aims of an izakaya probably are antithetical to the expectations around a bumping restaurant in the city’s hotbed.
So I shut off the questioning part of my brain and enjoy. The team meets the limitations of a beer and wine license with creative gumption, in the form of cocktails laced with sake and shochu. They indulge a spectrum of palates. The frozen one, churning away in a slushie machine behind the bar, blends a crisp, floral sake with blood orange, Aperol-adjacent Cappelletti Aperitivo and koji (the Japanese fermentation starter) for a savory-nutty hint of mystery.
At the opposite end — my end — is a martini variation of sake and shochu punctuated with dry vermouth, yuzu bitters and peppercorns. It hits strong and citrusy, not too flowery. In between those two extremes fall drinks highlighting lychee, lime and chocolate bitters, or orangey-complex Cocchi Torino, sherry and cherry vanilla bitters, or plum wine with rice milk, lemon, orange and bitters requested, I believe, as much for its cute penguin mug as for its refreshing qualities.
A few sips in and I’m ready to tear into the restaurant’s take on curry pan. This one resembles empanadas rather than the standard Japanese breaded dough pockets, flaking apart to reveal a lining of stretchy cheese and ground Wagyu beef simmered in sweet Japanese curry. Swipes through smooth aji verde bring cooling herbal contrast.
Rabilwongse’s chicken oysters (prized pieces of meat from the back of the bird’s thigh, so named for their size and shape) are a nod to Charles Namba, for whom he worked at Tsubaki and whose soriresu yakitori set the standard in the city, though Rabilwongse’s piercing sauce with galangal and tamarind stamps the dish with his own authority.
Be attentive to the slip of paper that lists the night’s specials. The best of them tend to graduate to the main menu. This includes the kitchen’s great underdog, a modest-looking sweet potato cooked in embers, slathered with miso butter and showered with chives. My eyes widen, every time, at its tripwire womp of umami and earthy sweetness. I hope for the return of two excellent specials: tsukune (chicken meatballs), fluffy even after absorbing the grill’s blistering smoke, and a soothing bowl of simmered hamachi collar, meaty in its maze of cartilage, paired with a melting hunk of daikon.
I’m in the minority over another recent, very popular creation, “Budo-gnocchi,” in which rice cakes and slippery shimeji mushrooms take an excursion to Italy under drifts of Parmesan and black winter truffles. I like the bounce of rice cakes, but in this context their chewiness bulldozes over every other aspect of the dish.
I feel similarly about the smooth-surfaced, plate-size seafood pancake. It circles so many variations in the genre — crisp-edged Vietnamese banh xeo, adaptable Japanese okonomiyaki, lacy-droopy Korean haemul-pajeon, eggy Thai hoi tod with mussels — without coalescing into its own entity. The notion nearly works; the ratios of crackle and squish need definition, and the seafood flavors could be sharpened.
A concrete idea borrowed from izayaka traditions I admire: Rice or noodle dishes tend to arrive at the end of the meal, as fortification after rounds of drinks. This includes Rabilwongse’s signature oshizushi, draped with salmon that’s torched and crowned with halos of sliced serrano chile marinated in soy. A layer of chopped, gently spiced salmon is appealingly jammy. No sushi purists would claim its virtues, but the playfulness matches the restaurant and the substantial portion leaves me and my table mates just-right sated.
Soft serve, the sweet savior of restaurants without pastry chefs, comes in two flavors, lately pandan and strawberry milk. Maybe ice cream will call to me more when the restaurant’s patio opens soon for warmer weather. For now it’s enough to savor the last drops of sake martini, catch the fading chords of “Crazy in Love” and bask one final minute in Budonoki’s buzz.
Budonoki
654 N. Virgil Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 928-2320, budonoki.la
Prices: Most dishes $14-$26, pressed sushi rolls $20, soft serve $10.
Details: Open 5:30-10 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday. Beer, wine and sake, including excellent sake-based cocktails. Street parking.
Recommended dishes: Naem (Thai pork sausage with crisped rice balls and slaw), negima (chicken oyster skewers), curry pan, sweet potato with miso butter.
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