Fresh Inexpensive Japanese Food Near Beverly Hills

My sister and I stumbled upon this wonderful Japanese restaurant in Century City, just a stone's throw from tony Beverly Hills. Unpromisingly situated above a Ralphs grocery store, this small unpretentious place serves up excellent Japanese food at reasonable prices. When we first entered the restaurant we almost turned around and left for our second choice, the much more upscale-looking Italian restaurant across the street. YEN looked so much like all those pseudo-Japanese restaurants that offered at best indifferent sushi and oily yakisoba. Instead we stayed - my sister was jonesing for some Japanese food and I was tired from a whole day of driving around Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. We ended up having the best meal of the whole weekend, which had included dining at restaurants in Beverly Hills (where we learned that valet parking is not an option but second nature).

After perusing the menu, my sister and I decided to try an assortment of dishes, settling on the salmon sashimi salad, the fried tofu triangles and shrimp and vegetable tempura. We were pleasantly surprised with the salad, which had super fresh pieces of translucent raw salmon amid a crisp mix of greens. This was finished off with a perfectly seasoned, not-too-salty dressing, for a delicious combination. (It was only much later that the spinach in the salad came to my mind, together with a half-remembered NPR report on the current spinach scare in southern California. Fortunately both the spinach and I turned out to be fine!)

The tempura was good, with the right amount of crispiness to the batter, but pretty much similar to tempura in other Japanese places I had been to. The real winner was the dish of fried tofu triangles served alongside a generous ribbon of sweet soy sauce. When I bit into the lightly battered coat I was met with a meltingly soft and airy tofu interior. The sweetness of the soy sauce served to emphasize the lovely texture of the tofu, which wasn't like any tofu I'd tasted before.

To round out our enjoyable dining experience, we were waited on by a little Japanese lady who made us feel like royalty. The price for this fabulous meal: a grand total of $42. Which shows that you CAN get inexpensive and good Japanese food in southern California, even within spitting distance of Beverly Hills. And if that doesn't appeal to you, there's always that other place across the street.