We’re way past sushi

THE twentysomething Japanese man on the tiny stage at Karaoke Bleu is proving that Friday night sounds good in any language, delivering a smooth version of Kyu Sakamoto’s old-school Japanese hit “Ue o Muite Aruko” to an appreciative audience. Dressed in Hollywood casual -- dark pants, light blue shirt, short hair well-coiffed -- he rejoins his table to a round of backslapping, and even those who don’t speak Japanese raise a toast from the bar. Asked if the singer is a regular, one of the other men at the bar says, “I don’t know, but can you sing that in Japanese?”

A big table of loud and half-sozzled young white women give a sincere cheer, then dispatch a trio of their own to pile onstage and destroy a Destiny’s Child chestnut, cracking up as they wail, “Say my name, say my name ...”

It’s another jammed weekend night at one of the best-loved clubs on a three-block stretch of Sawtelle Boulevard in West L.A., and the scene at Karaoke Bleu is indicative of the area’s multicultural appeal. As the waitresses take song request tickets and quickly usher singers onstage, the sounds of popular Japanese songs such as Hideaki Tokunaga’s “Saigo no Iiwake” mingle with sorority sisters doing Snoop Dogg, followed by a Korean American singing Bon Jovi. Connected by a restroom with the perennially crowded Japanese pub FuRaiBo -- both hot spots are run by the same company -- Karaoke Bleu goes beyond the traditional Japanese culture that once dominated the street, and even the Pan-Asian culture that is replacing it. It is a stark example of the rapid and ongoing mutation that is transforming the area into a kind of pan-exotic entertainment zone, an Asian-based strip of food, pop culture, art and clothing that is thronged by Westsiders ever-hungry for something new.

Sawtelle is sometimes called Little Osaka and is still deeply Japanese, with its nurseries and Buddhist temples and boba tea shops, but it is experiencing what many are calling a third phase in its identity. The issei who immigrated to the U.S. after the turn of the 20th century, when the area was mostly celery fields, are giving up their old shops, and the shin issei, or “new first generation” who immigrated after World War II, are losing their traditionalist grip on the culture.

IN their stead has come a new generation, many of them young students in their 20s straight from Japan, and they represent modern Japan. Like Tokyo, they are metropolitan and sophisticated, westernized and hungry. As rents in the area go through the roof, their numbers seem to increase, especially the young women -- no longer as funky-chic as in days past, with the bleached blond hair and spray-on tans or the platform boots and micro-minis. Nowadays, most of them are poured into skin-tight booty jeans and boots like everyone else in town.

They join sidewalks full of young people of other ethnicities -- lots of Chinese, lots of Koreans, a smattering of Latinos who’ve always lived in the area -- and funky hipsters from UCLA and the Westside looking for kicks, as well as serious foodies drifting down out of Pacific Palisades and Brentwood. In their wake come changes -- trendy, internationalist and mostly upscale.

At the corner of Sawtelle and LaGrange, a once-struggling cluster of shops has been reborn over the last two years as one of the Westside’s hottest dining destinations. Diners in their 30s and 40s crowd the patio outside Orris, a French-Japanese izakaya, a pub-style restaurant offering small plates like tapas, waiting for a table. Mizu 212 features shabu-shabu, in which diners cook their food in boiling water, a kind of twist on Korean barbecue. Mizu 212’s neighbor, the 5-month-old ramen hot spot Chabuya, is similarly stacked, with lots of overflow to Sushi Tenn and the little Ketchy II hamburger stand.

Down the street in the Olympic Collection strip mall, longtime French-Japanese restaurant Muse has been replaced by the busy French-Korean spot Zip Fusion, which has a trio of well-appointed karaoke rooms in the back. Also new is Tofu Ya, which specializes in a Korean soon tofu, a tofu soup served in an iron pot.

And then came Daichan, where the food is plucked from a revolving conveyor, dim-sum-style. Even more surprising to locals: The trendy Black Market clothing store, the first of its kind a few years back, now has company, including the chic shoe store Blu 82, which sells only super-trendy sneakers.

“In this area, along the back street, there’s a lot of apartment buildings, and there’s a new influx of Japanese immigrants now, the young kids, looking for a different lifestyle. I call it the New Issei Generation,” says Russell Yamaguchi, 38. Yamaguchi Gift Shop, owned by Yamaguchi’s father and his uncle, has been a staple of Japanese American culture on Sawtelle since 1946, a place to pick up beautifully made lacquerware or traditional stationery. Now father and uncle are considering closing up.

“Well, everything changes,” Yamaguchi says, chuckling. “Some people like it the same ol’ quaint way. I find it a little hectic around here. I prefer it to be a little slower. Now it’s a little hot spot where you can’t find parking. It’s quite busy all the time.”

“It’s thriving. Period. I think that’s a great thing, in itself,” says Audrey Shiomi, 29, a reporter for L.A. Japanese-language newspaper the Rafu Shimpo. She grew up mere blocks away from Sawtelle, and her parents and grandparents still live there.

“It’s indicative of the changes in the Japanese community,” she adds. Her office, she explains, is in Little Tokyo, where the story is much different. “Little Tokyo is already pretty much dead. We’re a struggling community out here. People look at our institutions, the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center and the Japanese American Citizens League, and think that it’s still very strong. But compared to before, you just don’t see people walking on the street on the weekends, coming here to go to the Japanese market.”

Sawtelle’s Nijiya Market, by contrast, is jammed on weekends. It’s a modern market, built in the 1990s, featuring most of the same groceries that the older Japanese American residents always bought, but not the same attitude. The nearby boutiques and restaurants pull in the crowds, and the market is open late into the weekend night. Shiomi thinks Sawtelle’s steadily morphing popularity is a good thing, even if one of her old hangouts, Yamaguchi’s, is considering throwing in the towel.

“Looking at Sawtelle, it is kind of sad to see a lot of my parents’ and my grandparents’ businesses close up,” she says. “But at the same time, what are you going to do?”

“The area is definitely changing,” says Eric Nakamura, 36, owner of the two Giant Robot stores on the block and the eclectic restaurant gr/eats. As a businessman responsible for three storefronts, his main concern is surviving.

“It’s a good mix of people. There are a lot of UCLA students. I think it’s better that way. That helps the businesses out. You get more variety and everyone has a stronger base as a result.”

STANDING outdoors in front of Orris on a recent Friday night, Westside resident Jonathan Gottlieb and two friends braved a light rain to try the well-reviewed restaurant.

“It’s my first time to Orris, actually,” Gottlieb says, “but I come to this area every few weeks.”

Most people come to Sawtelle to eat, and that is increasingly visible on the street. Orris doesn’t take reservations, so it’s common to see five to 10 people lined up on the patio, but you don’t see anyone frowning.

“This is my favorite type of food,” he adds. “You have Japanese, Thai, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese food all in a three-block stretch. It’s incredible. And I think the food is getting better as it gets more upscale, definitely.”

“Yeah, it used to be a place to go and eat good food on a budget, and you still can, but it’s changing a little,” says Amanda Burdin, one of Gottlieb’s friends.

The newest reinvention of renowned chef Hideo Yamashiro, who cooked at Chinois and for the last 18 years has owned Shiro in South Pasadena, Orris is French-Japanese fusion served as izakaya, on tiny plates at $6 to $12 a pop. The atmosphere is bar-like, with 20 wines available by the glass and the crowd of older foodies giving way to the young Japanese hipsters as the hour gets later.

“We’re very different from all of the other traditional Japanese restaurants along this street,” says Tatia Oshidari, Orris’ manager. “I’ve been living in this area for about 15 years, so I’ve definitely seen the change; it’s becoming a little restaurant row. So we felt the time was right for something that’s a little bit different. We get about 30% return customers almost every night.”

THE area already had some top-end restaurants, including Sushi Sasabune, which has now moved to Brentwood. It also had a history of fine -- but not expensive -- French-Japanese dining, established by the reliable cooking of chef Kenji Minamada at Sawtelle Kitchen, and in some of the French dishes across the street at 2117, a youshoku restaurant, meaning Japanese with Western influences. Like those well-patronized establishments, many of the regular customers at Orris are white.

“I wouldn’t say our primary customer is Japanese at all,” Oshidari says. “We do get some, and I would say they were younger, maybe in their 20s to 30s. But we get older people that live in the Palisades, and Santa Monica, and Brentwood, that have known Shiro for a while.”

Next door at Chabuya, it’s a different story. In Japan, Chabuya is one of the most respected names in ramen. This is its first restaurant in the U.S., and the Japanese food purists in the area, who sometimes eschew the popular Asahi Ramen and Kinchans Ramen as something less than the real thing, view Chabuya with reverence. Still, it represents new Japan, and its clientele are more likely to be young Japanese hipsters.

For those looking for uniquely Japanese Japanese food, or washoku, several new spots have popped up. Mizu 212’s idiosyncratic cook-at-the-table approach is something mostly found only in shabu-shabu restaurants in Japan. Meaning “swish-swish,” for the sound of a very thin slice of beef cooking in boiling water, this is a fun way to cook meat and vegetables and season them yourself, dipping them in ponzu and other sauces. At Daichan, a relatively new place in the Olympic Collection, the menu is sushi, but it’s delivered in a way that would never fly at a traditional sushi bar: The individual pieces come around on a conveyor belt, called kaiten-sushi, and the customers pick and choose for themselves.

“I took my grandparents to Daichan. These are things they’ve never been exposed to. It’s cool to introduce them to modern Japan,” Shiomi says.

At Zip Fusion, also in the Olympic Collection, smiling hostess Jennifer Yoon brings over some mixed drinks made with soju -- a kind of Korean vodka distilled from rice, barley and sweet potato -- to kick off a night of what the Japanese would call esunikku ryouri -- ethnic food. The potent drinks mix well with a specialty appetizer served at the bar: tuna, salmon and snapper sashimi with a dash of sesame vinaigrette and green onion served on a crispy rice tostada.

Zip’s Korean-French fusion menu has proved popular; the Sawtelle restaurant is owner Jason Ha’s third location in Southern California. On a recent night, the place was occupied mostly by young Japanese.

“The Japanese people are very adventurous and want to try new cuisines and to be cosmopolitan,” Yoon says. “So they try to work in the French influence.”

The area’s heavy foot traffic is also increasingly in a hurry. The chain restaurant Curry House moved into the three-story Sawtelle Place mall a few years back and became an instant favorite with its fast-and-hot chicken katsu, curry plates and coffee jello desserts.

Sawtelle is changing, but fast and cheap still works as well as it ever did.

YOU don’t know who Ray Fong is? C’mon: Ray Fong? If you didn’t know who artist Ray Fong was, you would have been in the minority at the Feb. 17 opening at Giant Robot 2 -- Giant Robot’s small gallery and retail space across the street from its original store full of eclectic Japanese and American pop culture books, videos and plastic toys. Giant Robot doesn’t do a lot of advertising, but the word got out, and when the doors opened hundreds of people, including owners of other galleries around town, were on hand looking for bargains.

Ray Fong -- it’s no secret, evidently -- is a pseudonym used by Barry McGee, aka Twist, a seminal San Francisco Bay Area artist who has made the jump from graffiti to fine art and whose work is shown in major museums. The works were small and rare opportunities for tattooed hipsters in search of art, with 12-by-12-inch paintings of McGee’s characteristic schlumpy sad-faced figures going for $1,500. The crowds kept pouring in from 6:30 p.m. until about 11. It was a night that may have established Sawtelle as more than just a few blocks of good food, boba shops, and rarefied Japanese groceries and Japanese videos at Video Jun: It is now the site of at least one extremely successful art show.

“This is the biggest show we’ve ever had,” said Eric Nakamura, standing in front of Giant Robot 2 in a black baseball cap and shooting digital photos of the guests. “It’s probably the biggest show ever on Sawtelle.”

In fact, Giant Robot feels like the future of Sawtelle. A spinoff of Nakamura’s 12-year-old hyper-urban magazine Giant Robot, which celebrates Pan-Asian pop culture with a uniquely American attitude located unreliably between worship and irony, Giant Robot stores are now also found in Silver Lake, New York and San Francisco. Nakamura grew up on Sawtelle and still lives five blocks away, and his stores have been a key to drawing in the hip, fashion-forward young iconoclasts who celebrate the area’s Japanese roots but are allergic to nostalgia.

“I’m of a younger generation that’s still in the area,” he says. “I’ve heard people say, ‘Oh, there’s no Japanese Americans owning businesses any more on Sawtelle.’ It’s becoming more Pan-Everybody. And that’s cool to me.”

Some of the businesspeople who rely on the older Japanese American customers aren’t so thrilled by the changes, and are struggling to adapt. Oscar Fay, owner of Mousse Fantasy, a French patisserie that’s been open for breakfast and lunch for 18 years in the Sawtelle Place mall, says the kids drop in for pastries, but tastes are changing.

“My food is light and it takes time to make,” he says over coffee one weekday morning, with no customers in sight. Though the pastries are French, his other food is Italian-Japanese. “My Japanese customers used to sit around and relax. The kids coming in now are younger and they want everything fast. They also want things heavier, sweeter, saltier.”

Maybe they want things more Giant Robot. Even the food.

On a Thursday night, Giant Robot’s restaurant, gr/eats (“I say ‘G.R.eats,’ but some say ‘greets,’ says Nakamura, “whatever”) is populated with young Japanese diners, and there’s art on the walls by contemporary artist Ai Yamaguchi, an alternative spin on classical Japanese nature painting.

But this doesn’t seem to be a Japanese restaurant, per se. Maybe the first clue is England Dan and John Ford Coley’s ‘70s love-gush “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight” blasting through the small cafe.

Then there’s the menu, which features an “El Salvadoran-style” seafood paella, fish tacos, penne pesto and the gr/eats burger. Sure, there’s still salmon teriyaki, ohitashi -- a chilled spinach appetizer -- and a variety of tofu dishes, but clearly something else is going on here.

“We just wanted to make a place that made the food we wanted to eat,” says Nakamura. “It has to be us, as Giant Robot and as people who work here now. It has to reflect our vision.”

It’s not as packed as, say, the Blue Marlin, the youshoku restaurant in the Sawtelle Centre where Japanese people really go night after night to eat. But it wasn’t intended to be, either. It’s a tectonic shift, an experimental act of reinvention that reflects the area’s burgeoning new identity.

“Eric and I, we both went to Japanese school right around the corner from Sawtelle,” journalist Shiomi says.

Although happy with the living, breathing culture thriving there, she’s a bit wistful about losing places like the original Ketchy hamburger stand, or Yamaguchi Gifts. “We grew up on Sawtelle. It’s basically diminishing in front of our eyes, our entire childhood.”

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Orris

Chef Hideo Yamashiro (of South Pasadena’s renowned Shiro) changes his step with French-Japanese izakaya, or tapas, and all the wines are available by the glass. 2006 Sawtelle Blvd. (310) 268-2212.

Sawtelle Kitchen

Diners are willing to bring their own wine and wait on line to enjoy the sweet little room and Kenji Minamada’s reliable French-Japanese cuisine. 2024 Sawtelle Blvd. (310) 445-9288.

Curry House

Huge plates of chicken katsu (breaded chicken cutlet, rice and curry sauce), Japanese spaghetti and coffee jello for dessert, on a student budget. 2130 Sawtelle Blvd. (310) 479-8477.

Tofu Ya

The only stop on Sawtelle for purists hunting Korean tofu dishes like soon doo-boo jji-gae, a steaming hot tofu soup with seafood and meat made extra spicy with red pepper. 2021 Sawtelle Blvd. (310) 473-2627.

Mizu 212

Modern take on shabu-shabu, where diners cook their own meat and vegetables in boiling water right at their seats. 2000 Sawtelle Blvd. (310) 478-8979.

Karaoke Bleu

Japanese songs dominate the private studios at Yuu-Yuu down the street, but the clubby Bleu is a smallish bar where you’re just as likely to hear sorority gals wailing Beyonce. 2064 Sawtelle Blvd. (310) 477-4794.

Chabuya

For ramen-o-philes, heaven: the only U.S. outlet of one of the most-respected upscale ramen houses in Japan. 2002 Sawtelle Blvd. (310) 473-1013.

Volcano Tea

Still the favorite for boba, a hyper-sweet concoction of tea, sugar and colored balls of tapioca sucked up through a ski-pole-sized straw. 2111 Sawtelle Blvd. (310) 445-5326.

Zip Fusion

Korean-French fusion dishes such as jalapeno tuna tempura, washed down with clear, vodka-like soju made from rice, barley and sweet potato. 11301 W. Olympic Blvd. (310) 575-3636.

FuRaiBo

For years, the area’s most popular Japanese pub-style eatery. Crowded and fun, with specials like tabesaki: chicken wings fried in peanut oil. 2068 Sawtelle Blvd. (310) 444-1432.

Giant Robot

Load up on obscuro Japanese pop culture like T-shirts, art books and collectible plastic figures, from the mass-produced Evil Ape series to a $300 Tim Biskup artist’s model. Store, 2015 Sawtelle Blvd. (310) 478-1819. GR2 gallery: 2062 Sawtelle Blvd. (310) 445-9276.

gr/eats

Run by pop culture hounds, the Giant Robot cafe offers an eclectic menu great for lunch. 2050 Sawtelle Blvd. (310) 478-3342.

Video Addict

If you keep up with all of the Japanese soaps, game shows and sitcoms, or want to start, this is the source for Japanese expats, Hollywood directors and Japanophiles citywide. 1818 Sawtelle Blvd. (310) 312-5083.

Mousse Fantasy

At Sawtelle’s only breakfast joint, owner Oscar Fay will make you an omelet and coffee as a warm-up for delicious light pastries and cakes in the afternoon, but it closes before the late-night crowd arrives. 2130 Sawtelle Blvd. (310) 479-6665.

Nijiya Market

Nijiya is Japanese pop in the form of grocery shopping, a universe of strange candies, gorgeous fruits, an infinity of seaweeds and canned coffees in packaging too wonderful to throw out. 2130 Sawtelle Blvd. No. 105. (310) 575-3300.

Catch 22

A tiny new cafe open till midnight, sometimes with DJs spinning for lingerers out on the sidewalk. 11301 W. Olympic Blvd., No. 103. (310) 473-3668.

Black Market

Trendy clothing store and under-the-radar art gallery whose DJ-powered openings for artists like Ed Hardy attract hipsters spilling out into the street. 2023 Sawtelle Blvd. (310) 966-1555.