Date of Visit: December 12, 2008

The owners of Otafuku don’t exactly do a great job at promoting their izakaya. The front window is screened over, the front door is locked and you have to squint to see the name on the green awning. Still, the two-room pub is frequently packed, a testament to their hearty Japanese cooking.

Otafuku features a long menu with dozens of options, including simmered, stewed, skewered, deep-fried, grilled and tempura dishes. None of the dishes top the mid teens, price-wise, so ordering is not exactly a big risk.

Shishito with Whitebait ($7) featured spicy stir-fried peppers with tiny fish that never seem to taste as good when they appear as Korean panchan. At Otatfuku, they’re pleasantly chewy and salty.

The metal bowl of Egg with Eel and Perilla ($10) included a kelp-based soup stock, tender cuts of fresh water eel, egg strands and aromatic Japanese parsley. Otafuku uses egg yolks in the broth as a thickening agent, to good effect. The “soup” is hearty, true comfort food.

Simmered Chicken Liver ($5) showcased cool chunks of minerally liver cooked in soy sauce and mirin (a sweet sake-like rice wine), garnished with strands of marinated ginger. Liver is better hotter, with a sear and a supple interior. Cold, it’s almost crumbly.

Otafuku Homemade Fried Chicken ($10) turned out to be fairly innocuous chunks of chicken with sheathes that could have been crisper. A few dips in salt helped. The chicken came with a nice mixed green salad with yuzu vinaigrette.

Otafuku’s specialty is seiro soba ($11.50 for large serving), a “quite thin white noodle made of a mixture of special white buckwheat flour, using only the heart of soba seeds.” It’s possible to get seiro cold (traditional), with tempura, with chicken soup, with gravy and egg, or with curry. We got it simple, dipping the al dente noodles in soy sauce stirred with razor-thin scallions and faux wasabi.

After you’re done picking the last noodle from the bamboo mat, the waitress brings a pitcher of soba-yu, the broth enriched with residual starch from the buckwheat noodles. The cooking liquid was soothing on a cool night, meshing surprisingly well with the remaining soy, “wasabi” and scallions.

Otafuku produced one of my better izakaya meals in 2008, and given how many other dishes are on the menu, it won’t be my last visit.

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This entry is filed under California, Japanese, Los Angeles, South Bay/Long Beach, Southern California.