la.foodblogging

This week Jonathan Gold covers Umenohana, a restaurant he says is the “first major tofu kaiseki house in the United States…a luxurious fortress of bean curd in all of its sundry forms.” Umenohana is an L.A. off-shoot of the Tokyo chain (like Chaya, Torafuku, Furaibo, Gyu-Kaku and Yoro No Taki) “but there has never been a restaurant quite as grand as this.”

Okay, I’m in the car, blowing through red lights down Wilshire, aiming my compact toward the kaiseki menu. In particular, I’m curious about the fukufuku tofu, which Gold describes as “astonishing:”

…coaxed into existence in a tabletop steamer: a quivering, tremulous substance so delicate that sheets of it must be maneuvered to your bowl with special bentwood implements that resemble something out of the Frank Gehry workshop circa 1992, a stark-white foodstuff that dissolves into pure flavor the second it reaches your tongue, with a sweetish aftertaste so subtle it could almost be a rumor.

Los Angeles Business Journal has written two stories on Umenohana in the past 16 months. The first article last March noted that the owners made the bar a centerpiece in L.A. unlike the Japanese locations. A later story suggests that the owners are “struggling (to) convert diners to its menu of tofu and tofu skin.”

I have to think that spending $38 to $74 on a 5-8 course tofu meal, in a part of town I know I drive out of my way to avoid, probably won’t appeal to everyone. And despite the fact that the restaurant looks like it might be uncomfortably austere, and the staff painfully self-serious (from the look of Ann Fishbein’s photo in Weekly), I still want to check it out, before any untimely closing on the part of its owners.

Umenohana
443 N. Canon Drive
Beverly Hills
(310) 860-9236

Photo: roland