Restaurant Komasa

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Japanese food, especially sushi, is a must when I visit LA.  Even the most average sushi restaurant in LA is 10x better than sushi in the Bay Area plus its cheaper.  Sushi Komasa is one of the more popular sushi restaurants in LA's Japantown.  Not the level of Urasawa or even Sushi-Gen, but its still pretty awesome.  The line here starts right when the restaurant opens so you have to get here early if you don't want to wait over an hour.

Inside the restaurant, it looks like an average sushi restaurant with seats at the bar and a couple of tables.

Each piece of the fish in the chirashi is super fresh and worth the meager $12.  Something like this in SF would cost $18 at least.  I don't usually eat maguro (tuna) because I find that its usually flavorless and uncomparable to what I've eaten in Japan, but the maguro at Komasa hailed a "not bad" from me.  I enjoyed the uni here.  It was custardy and sweet.

One thing to note here is the fish in the sushi does come room temperature, which is uncommon in the US, but pretty standard in Japan.  Even though the coloring of the salmon was a pasty pink color, the flavor was rich and buttery.

The hirame (halibut) was lightly brushed with soy sauce and topped with ume (plum).  The sushi had a contrasting taste of sweetness from the fish, salty from the soy sauce, and sourness from the plum.

It took me a couple minutes to realize that this was the scallop sushi that I ordered.  I was expecting the hotate to come sliced on a bed of rice, but instead it was chopped up and mixed with mayo and roe.  I'm not a fan of mayo mixed sushi because I feel like its hiding unfresh fish.

 

The tamago (egg) was fluffy and had a nice custard texture.  

 

The salmon skin roll was mixed with pickled vegetables, but the skin didn't have the crackly crisp that I expected.

For the nonsushi eaters, Komasa offers a range of cooked combination items.  The tonkatsu was a little dry and too lean for my taste.  The tempura had every vegetable, except for my favorite eggplant piece.  The potato salad side dish had a mix of mashed potatoes and chunky potatoes for delicious contrasting textures.

      

Address:                      Restaurant Komasa
                                     351 E. 2nd St.
                                     Los Angeles, CA 
 

Type:                            Japanese/sushi

Popular chomps:          spicy tuna roll
                                      sweet shrimp
                                      uni

Chomp worthy:             uni
                                      chirashi