Restaurant I-NABA Torrance

A stylish Authentic Japanese Cuisine"- All Kinds. Inaba is located along Hawthorne Blvd., going south to 405, in the market plaza to your right. The restaurant is always full, both for lunch and for dinner. It is a stylish place of dainty flower arrangements, slanted mirrors and mustard-yellow teblecloths. Delicate banboo shades shield the windows. All you hear is hushed conversation and faint music at least when the sizzling deep fryer momentarily falls silent. This spare dining room is not the only place to eat here, though. Hidden by curtains is a private tempura bar for customers who advance-order lavish yorokobi-an dinners. Slightly worn blue curtains hang above the main kitchen, but not so low as to hide what the chefs are doing. Mostly, they are frying.

I-naba serves a wide range of hot and cold Japanese dishes as well as the obligatory sashimi first couse for those with more to spend. But crisp, clean-tasting tempura is teh main event here. It comes in elegant, complex set menus, you're supposed to work your way into tempura gradually (rarely, if ever, will you see a Japanese diner plunging directly into a fried food course).

If you feel adventurous, call a day in advance and order one of thoese yorokobi-an dinners (basically, Japanese tea ceremony food plus tempur dishes), which range in price from $40 to $70. As in any Japanese restaurant that serves tea ceremony food, it's impossible to predict what ingredients will appear in the meal, only that you can expect everything to be extremely fresh.