An authentic Japanese import

THE server sets down a porcelain plate and announces, “Potato and cheese croquettes.” As I look at the two golf ball-sized croquettes and find myself mesmerized by the bonito flakes on top fluttering like the tentacles of some eccentric sea urchin, he quickly adds, “with fish flakes.” Not everybody would necessarily know.

The bonito flakes look as if they’re about to flutter right off and fly around the room, but when I check, the window isn’t open. Through the window I look down on a garden and a pool with fish flashing a brilliant orange. Silky-leaved maples nod in the breeze as I watch guests come through the garden gate and enter Gonpachi, a new Japanese restaurant on La Cienega’s restaurant row.

Gonpachi is the first example in this country of the well-known Tokyo-based Gonpachi chain owned by Global Dining Inc. (which also owns La Boheme in West Hollywood and Monsoon Cafe in Santa Monica).

Though the fare may not be fine dining, it’s definitely fun dining. A high-end izakaya-style spot, it’s the kind of place young Tokyo businesspeople stop by after work to meet a friend for a drink and a bite. But translating the chain’s success to an American, and specifically Angeleno, idiom may not be so easy. And there’s plenty of competition, including Matsuhisa across the street and soon-to-open Nobu.

Gonpachi’s middlebrow menu has something for everyone -- new-style Japanese fusion dishes for up-to-the-minute tastes, izakaya-style sumiyaki (skewers of meat, seafood and vegetables grilled over hardwood charcoal) and hearty rice bowls, plus standard sushi and California-style rolls, along with a few more substantial main-course items.

The art of making soba

AND then there is soba. Hardly revolutionary, but here the tasty buckwheat noodles are freshly made in a tiny glassed-in room just off the maitre d’s station. Each time I dine at Gonpachi, I catch a different part of the process. Once the resident soba master is measuring the blue-grayish buckwheat flour into a huge red lacquer bowl. (This may be the only place in Southern California that grinds its own buckwheat flour.) Another time, he vigorously kneads the stiff dough.

On my first visit, he’s cutting the dough with a wide-bladed knife -- chak, chak, chak -- and then, almost tenderly, laying hanks of the fine noodles onto a bamboo tray. It’s worth a trip to Gonpachi just to see, and taste, the soba.

Global Dining has made a huge investment in the Beverly Hills Gonpachi. It took nearly three years and cost some $18.5 million to turn the former Ed Debevic’s retro diner into a grand Japanese country restaurant. That’s a lot of noodles.

Almost all the building materials came from Japan: the gray roof tiles made by the best tile maker in Japan; architectural details from three disassembled homes (more than 200 years old) that have been incorporated into the design; stones for the exterior walls and gateways.

The garden is a work of art; part of the restaurant, which consists of three joined buildings, has been built around its verdant calm. Sliding doors open onto cool green, and many of the rooms have garden views. Including the bar, which after trying various seating configurations, seems to be the most congenial of spots, perfect for a Japanese beer or some chilled sake with some of Gonpachi’s little dishes.

The main dining room faces the sumiyaki kitchen where cooks grill skewers over hardwood charcoal imported from Japan, breathing life into the coals with red paper fans. Upstairs on a sort of mezzanine overlooking the dining room is a series of small and large booths that are almost private rooms unto themselves, yet you never feel isolated from the life of the restaurant. There also are a couple of tatami rooms upstairs, and some smaller private dining rooms.

All these flexible seating areas make Gonpachi ideal for a date. Instead of the glare of fluorescent and tiny tables at the usual sushi restaurant, you can eat under the light of hand-forged iron lanterns.

The launch of the restaurant was a bit rocky as Japanese and American management teams tried to adjust to each others’ styles. When it didn’t work, they made a change, and more are in the works. In the next few weeks, the main dining room will be devoted to sumiyaki, the sushi bar to sushi, yet you’ll be able to order off the menu from either venue (which doesn’t sound very different from what’s going on now). Executive chef Masa Yamamoto and kitchen chef Yasu Kusano also have plans to introduce one or two prix fixe menus and add more entrees.

Managers in suits, and wearing earpieces, roam up and down and all around the restaurant seemingly without much to do, though they’re all incredibly welcoming and accommodating. Waiters too have been unfailingly enthusiastic and attentive. But there remains one problem: the food.

With the exception of the soba and the sumiyaki items, nothing has much character. It’s not bad, really, just not very good. You can have a perfectly OK meal if you stick with the above items. Just stay away from plainer items such as sashimi and sushi in which the quality of the ingredients really shows. It’s not any worse than most mid-level sushi restaurants, and prices aren’t much higher either. It’s just that the grandiose setting, with all its beautiful details, leads you to expect more from the kitchen. You can have a good enough meal, though, if you order carefully.

The soba is impressive for its texture and flavor. The square-cut buckwheat noodles are about the size of spaghetti alla chitarra and cooked so they still have some bounce. Though you can order them hot or cold, I like them best, especially at this season, served chilled on a bamboo tray. A classic soy-based dipping sauce comes with it, and some sliced scallions and a dab of wasabi. When you’re finished eating the noodles, the server brings out a lacquer teapot filled with the cooking water. Pour it into what remains of your dipping sauce to make a delicious soup.

You can also order the soba with tempura, but it’s really not anything special. The shrimp doesn’t have much flavor. The vegetables -- pumpkin, asparagus, green bean -- are better, but neither benefits from the workmanlike batter. I’ve had better tempura in Torrance or Little Tokyo.

Top choice among the appetizers and little dishes is yukke, or tuna tartare. The raw fish is hand-cut, tossed in a piquant dressing and served with lacy lotus root chips, cucumber and a quail’s egg. Lotus root appears again with burdock root in a crunchy salad perfumed with sesame oil and fired with togarash (red pepper). Zaru tofu is a cloud of very soft, plain tofu served in a bamboo basket with a trio of tricked-up sauces. I kind of like the pickled plum one, (it’s been changed to cucumber since my visit), but the garlic sauce is dreadful, and the house dashi is hardly inspiring either. Shrimp fritters are pretty good, but those potato and cheese croquettes are just plain weird. At the time of my visit, they were made with ground beef mixed in with the mashed potato and a dab of molten cheese at the heart. (They’ve now dispensed with the beef.) There’s a dash of Worcestershire sauce too. The whole effect is like something whipped up by a demented country club chef in the ‘50s.

Hot off the grill

ORDERING from the sumiyaki bar is always fun, but Gonpachi’s has its ups and downs. The best items I tried were the simplest -- mild green shishito peppers, spicy marinated chicken wings, beef tongue and a sort of elongated meatball of minced chicken and duck on a stick.

But fancier specials such as scallops with sea urchin sauce and caviar or bluefin tuna with black truffles head off in the wrong direction. Nobu Matsuhisa can pull off this kind of thing, but not this kitchen. Scallops barely warmed through, the caviar not worth notice. And the black truffle on top of the grilled bluefin tuna might as well have been chips of black plastic for all the flavor they had. As it’s not black truffle season, these have to be canned or preserved truffles anyway.

Here’s what I think. Fusion doesn’t cut both ways. What would appeal to a Tokyo salary man’s palate doesn’t necessarily appeal to an American’s. It’s the same with fashion sense: It simply doesn’t cross over. And adding touches of western luxe ingredients such as caviar and truffles completely misses the mark. The management is still trying to figure out how to intrigue Angelenos. And I think they don’t have much of a clue, really. At least not yet. Though they have caught on to the ever-popular wacky, over-the-top sushi rolls with five kinds of fish and avocado and spicy sauces. They’re also aware that savory dishes with an element of sweet have a big appeal, and so sauces tend to be edging up on cloying.

The restaurant does have a nice enough wine list, with a number of whites that are perfectly suited to Japanese food. Skip over the Chardonnays and head to “other whites,” such as Domaine des Baumard Savennieres Clos du Papillon or a Hugel Gewurztraminer. They also have an extensive list of sakes in different styles, each with tasting notes.

Desserts, however, are still a work in progress. The red bean pancake is soon to exit the menu, I’m told. That’s a good thing, because the combination of tough pancake, red bean paste and stiff, sweet whipped cream is quite awful. A new dessert, though, is perfect after an izakaya meal: It’s a fish bowl-sized bowl of ice topped with orange, tangerine and pink and white grapefruit segments and a squirt of yuzu.

As I pick up my car outside one night, a Japanese woman gives the address of her Santa Monica hotel to a taxi. That could easily be a $30 taxi ride each way. I wonder why she’s spending perhaps her only night in L.A. at a restaurant she could find in Tokyo. It could be devotion or fear of something new. But whatever it is, I don’t think there can be that many like her out there. Gonpachi is going to have to do better to fill up all those rooms. Something is getting lost in the translation.

virbila@latimes.com

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Gonpachi

Rating: *

Location: 134 N. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills; (310) 659-8887; www.la-gonpachi.com.

Ambience: Sprawling, meticulously crafted Japanese restaurant with dining rooms and nooks on several levels, many with a view of the lovely garden. There’s a sumiyaki bar where cooks grill skewers over a hardwood fire, a sushi bar and at the front, a small glassed-in room where a soba master rolls out buckwheat noodles.

Service: Enthusiastic and friendly.

Price: Appetizers, $2.50 to $25; salads, $8.50 to $10; soba, $7.50 to $12.50; tempura, $3 to $12; sumiyaki, $2.50 to $10; sushi combinations, $13.50 to $28; desserts, $6 to $8.

Best dishes: Zaru tofu, kinpira (lotus and burdock root salad), shrimp fritter, tuna tartare, sumiyaki (minced chicken and duck, shishito peppers, beef tongue, marinated chicken wings), chilled soba, citrus soup over ice.

Wine list: Modest but with some whites suited to the cuisine; also an extensive list of sakes in various styles. Corkage fee $20.

Best table: One of the large booths upstairs.

Details: Open daily from 5 to 11 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking, $5.50.

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Rating is based on food, service and ambience, with price taken into account in relation to quality. ****: Outstanding on every level. ***: Excellent. **: Very good. *: Good. No star: Poor to satisfactory.