Shibucho Restaurant, Los Angeles

~ Listings and Reviews for Shibucho ~

The New York Times WHAT'S DOING IN: Los Angeles By ROBERT REINHOLD Published: November 28, 1993 The 18-year-old Shibucho restaurant still has a loyal Japanese following for its excellent sushi even though the neighborhood near 3114 West Beverly Boulevard is now mostly Hispanic. It serves strictly sushi in a wood-paneled Tokyo-like dining room. LA Weekly Out and In Where to go after the Music Center By Jonathan Gold  Thursday, Oct 22 1998 Shibucho Smoking in restaurants has been illegal for a while, but the Beverly Boulevard Shibucho still feels like a smoke-filled room, packed with Japanese businessmen, crowds of expats and students, also the hipper brand of record-company executive, well fortified with alcohol, eating mountains of Dungeness crab, treating the sushi bar like . . . a bar. (Presumably flush with yen, half the bar was sluicing down its sushi with first-rate red Bordeaux the last time I was in.) The snacky kinds of sushi are superb here, salmon-skin hand rolls sharp with pungent gobo root, sushi rolls stuffed with Japanese pickles, sushi of sweet shrimp. And the sashimi is very fine, artful even: streaky slices of fat tuna, rich little clams, cool slabs of ankimo (monkfish liver) that is more or less the foie gras of the sea. Food & Wine Southern California's Ultimate Wine & Food Road Trip Sushi with Burgundy? Senior editor Kate Krader eats and drinks it all on a whirlwind tour of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and San Diego. By Kate Krader MONDAY, 6 P.M. Shibucho is located in a sketchy neighborhood on Beverly Boulevard. When we walk in, the place seems sketchy too. Most sushi places put their most pristine fish front and center, but at Shibucho the display case is lined with curly parsley and a hunk of monkfish liver. At first glance, the wine list looks like a joke: No wine seems to be younger than five years old or cheaper than $100. Peter was skeptical about the wine storage, but the 1986 Morey-Saint-Denis 1er Cru Les Sorbets (a good deal at $150, he said) was appropriately cool, so we stayed and had an awesome time. The chef, Shige Kudo, says he started drinking wine because he doesn't like sake and beer; he thinks old Bordeaux and Burgundies, whose tannins have mellowed over the years, are great with sushi. And he's right. The luxurious toro slices brighten up the fruit in a beautiful old red (a little hit of wasabi enhanced the pairing; soy sauce did not). At the end, Shige presents diners with their wine label wrapped in parchment, just like at a three-star restaurant in Paris.

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