Torafuku: Riffing on Tokyo in West L.A. [CLOSED]

Japanese Restaurant Los Angeles

In Japanese, “fuku” means “good luck” or “good fortune,” and it was indeed fortunate when TOMOSTYLE founder and friend Tomo Kurokawa continued a tour of her favorite Japanese restaurants in L.A. This was Stop #2 for me, Tomo and Street Gourmet LA founder Bill Esparza, following a successful foray to Kiriko. Torafuku is a restaurant Tomo knows from her home “town” of Tokyo, and Tetsuya Harikawa opened a branch in the shadow of the Westside Pavilion in 2004.


Torafuku features wood tables, a sushi bar, and cast iron pots with wood lids that are used to prepare rice in traditional fashion. The space also showcases plenty of art work, including traditional gold leaf panel screens that depict royalty, samurai, and laborers who carry royal boxes.

Japanese Food Los Angeles
Torafuku primarily sticks with traditional Japanese cuisine, though they did have unexpected, kind of wacky items like fried sticks of yucca, creamy inside, served with wasabi ranch dipping sauce.

Japanese Food Los Angeles
Fried vegetable egg rolls sported crisp sheathes and contained cabbage and mushrooms like wood ear. The restaurant served the rolls with whole grain mustard and ketchup for dipping. We got the junk food out of the way with our first two courses, then continued to delve deeper into Japan.

Japanese Food Los Angeles
Black cod appears on a lot of Japanese menus, and it should. Here, they marinate a pair of fillets in soy and sugar and grill over charcoal, so the fatty fish achieves good sweetness and winning caramelization. Pickled seaweed strips tempered the dish’s richness.

Japanese Food Los Angeles
Seared tuna was another nice starter, served with daikon, tangy ponzu, crispy garlic chips, greens and crunchy white onion. The dish was a good mix of flavors and textures.

Japanese Food Los Angeles
Soy products generally aren’t my favorite, but yuba “sashimi” had enough contrasts to hold my interest. The skimmed soy appeared with bonito dashi gelee, crunchy thin-shaved radish and wasabi, which packed some heat.

Japanese Food Los Angeles
Since Torafuku puts some a premium on their rice preparation, we had to get at least one order. Our fried rice arrived on sizzling ceramics, topped with savory baby anchovies, scallions and a central egg, with a side dish of crisp, dried seaweed strips, which bumped up the umami even more.

Japanese Food Los Angeles
Our server fully integrated the fried rice, forming a savory dome with nice crispy bits.

Japanese Food Los Angeles
Beef tataki was another dish we’d all seen before, but it still worked well. They dressed seared, well-marbled meat with tangy ponzu, sesame oil, Japanese chives, sprouts, raw white onion, and crispy garlic bits.

Japanese Food Los Angeles
Toktatsu ($12), a thick-cut Kurobuta pork cutlet, appeared on a metal rack, shrouded in a thick, crispy sheathe of deep-fried panko, which locked in the premium pig’s natural juices. It appears with a savory dipping sauce that resembles motor oil but tastes much better, involving soy sauce, sugar and a host of other ingredients. On the side, we received a shredded salad topped with tangy dressing, a nice complement to a hearty dish.

Japanese Food Los Angeles
Grilled dark meat chicken benefited from a squeeze of lemon and tart yuzu pepper paste.

Sake Los Angeles
We split a bottle of Dewazakura Izumi Judan sake from northeast Japan, Yamagata Prefecture, in the “Japanese Alps,” a super dry ginjo sake presented on ice in barrel with copper bands.

Mochi Los Angeles
We finished with smoky grilled mochi, filled with earthy red bean and plated with a scoop of vanilla ice cream that they dusted with kinako, soy bean powder.

Japanese Food Los Angeles
Another dish it would have been hard to anticipate at a Japanese restaurant was a slice of maple caramel pudding, aka flan, which was surprisingly light, served with whipped cream.

Torafuku isn’t redefining how Angelenos are eating Japanese food, but it’s a solid restaurant with fun (sometimes wacky) twists and relatively good value in a central location.

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Joshua Lurie

Joshua Lurie founded FoodGPS in 2005. Read about him here.

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