LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 51

eoDoofiff Japanese curry in Beverly Hi BY JONATHAN GOLD tertainment guys and the Japanese hotel guests themselves, who can be spotted by Tokyo haircuts and Chanel purses so new that they squeak. In Japan, curry is the rough equivalent of the American tuna-fish casserole, thrown together in minutes, easily reheated and still edible when a family member comes home four hours late from the office. There are probably as many curry jokes in Japanese popular culture as there are meat-loaf jokes in ours. If The Honeymooners were set in Osaka instead of Brooklyn, Ralph would eat a lot of curry. Vermont House curry is the most popular packaged curry in Japan, a product as ubiquitous in Japanese pantries as Heinz ketchup is in ours.

The Curry House chain is run by an arm of the company that makes Vermont House curry, and while the Curry House product is both fresher and more complex than the powder that comes in those stiff foil envelopes, it is obviously a result of the same aesthetic. The Curry House has a sizable menu of everyday Japanese cooking, the limp roe-flavored spaghetti, teriyaki chicken and pureed corn soup that signify to Tokyoites the other side of the Pacific Rim. I am fond of the iced coffee that comes with little pitchers of sugar syrup and cream, and the beautiful little chromed-steel caddies that hold vivid red pickled ginger, neon-green cucumber relish and pickled onions white as a movie stars teeth most of the people I know tend to empty the relish caddy by the end of a meal here. Its decent stuff, the Curry House curry, a sticky, dense, vegetarian goo, dark as a Louisiana roux, copious enough in quantity to ease down several pounds of rice. Japan may bs home to the most sophls- ticated food culture in the world, one where even schoolchildren can discern the subtle differences among a dozen different kinds of seaweed, where fish are expected to taste of themselves and where delicacy is a virtue that ranks behind only absolute freshness.

Japanese cooking is more seasonal than anything Alice Waters has ever dreamed of some prized mushrooms measure their seasons in weeks, some herbs in days. Some kaiseki dinners cost a thousand dollars a head, and are reputed actually to be worth it. Still, Japanese are as likely to sit through a four-hour kaiseki on any given day as you are to eat at lOrangerie tonight most people live on noodles, and rice omelets, and bits of simmered fish. Consider a plate of Japanese curry, one of the most popular everyday foods in Japan, a giant slick of tan glop, uniform in texture, that wells up toward high drifts of sticky Japanese rice, laps at the base of fried pork cutlets and fills Japanese bellies in a way that 200 bowls of exquisite sunomono could not be expected to do. Los Angeles has always been home to a number'of Japanese curry restaurants, and the newest is the Beverly Hills branch of the Curry House, a big Japanese chain.

The new Curry House is a slick, highly designed restaurant in the building that briefly housed Robert Gadsbys Pyramid (and before that, Bar-B-Q Heaven, which was where Beverly Hills went for ribs in the 60s and 70s), a soaring space with acres of blond wood and bright paintings on the walls. At noontime, the Curry House seems to serve as a commissary for the Japanese employees of the Hotel Nikko across the street; later on, the restaurant fills up with hip professionals, bearded en Ill i to trade with die Japanese, and whose dishes inspired tempura, tonkatsu and various meat stews. Japanese curry, in fact, tastes more like the sort of African gravies you find in the Portuguese colony Macao than it does like anything you might run across in Britain, or for that matter India, but is characteristically Japanese: sweet, thick, homogenized, and powered by a multilayered pepper heat that somehow comes together as a single note. IQ 163 N. La Cienega Beverly Hills; (310) 854-4959.

Open daily for lunch and dinner. Dinner for two, food only, Beer and wine. Takeout. Validated, valet parking. AE, A1C, V.

Recommended dishes: pork-cutlet curry; hamburger curry. Also at 123 S. Astronaut Ellison Onizuka Little Tokyo. You can order it at several levels of spiciness, ranging from super-mild to cue-sauce hot, have it garnished with breaded, fried cutlets of beef, pork or chicken, or have it bathing seafood or vegetables. One variation includes fried shrimp that are more batter than seafood, and a mound of turmeric-yellow rice encased in a paper-thin omelet.

The wiener and spinach curry Ive never tried it is actually one of the most expensive things on the menu. And the seared hamburger, a high-tech version of the patty your Aunt Doris may have made with beef and Lipton soup mix, is not so bad. A blurb on the back of the menu at Curry House credits the English with introducing curry to Japan a century ago. A more likely scenario points to the Portuguese, who were the first Westerners Nice Time Deli Take the Chinese bitter gourd, a warty, pale-green thing the size of a large cucumber, as bitter as envy, as bitter as hot tears. Please.

Sauteed bitter gourd, as prepared at the splendid Taiwanese-style Nice Time Deli, has the mephitic funk of the green beans they used to serve at your elementary school cafeteria, and the luscious succulence of really ripe honey-dew melon. Your first taste of the stuff, mellowed by the sweetness of shredded pork and the small pungence of fermented black beans, may remind you of braised celery until the onset a second or two later of the aftertaste, a shocking, penetrating bitterness with all the subtlety of a tongue piercing, not chocolate bitter or even tea bitter, but cancer-medicine bitter, a bitterness that will still be with you four hours later. Yet there is something oddly appealing about bitter gourd. You really should try it. 140 W.

Valley No. 209, San Gabriel; (818) 288-0149. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Lunch for two, food only, $5 $12. No alcohol.

Lot parking. Cash only Battambang A typical mouthful of Cambodian food might include three or four different kinds of fresh mint, something fishy and slightly rank, and a jolt of garlic powerful enough to lift you out of your chair. One unusual salad at Battambang involves leathery, parchment-thin strips of dried fish and pork tossed with various mints and lettuces, and great lashings of the medicine-bitter vegetable sadao, which looks like rapini punctuated with hundreds of tiny bright-yellow flower buds. Bubbling chimney pots full of sour fish soup are flavored with pineapple and spears of fresh cucumber, the broth slightly muddied by the wild flavor of the fresh, though decidedly not farm-raised, slices of catfish cosseted in its depths. Powerfully sour, chile-red beef soup comes spiked with bits of herbs, Chinese long beans, and purely ornamental chunks of cow that have clearly given their all to the broth.

648 New High Chinatown; (213) 620-9015. Open daily 7:30 a.m.-6:30 p.m. Lunch or dinner for two, food only, No alcohol. Takeout. Lot parking.

Cash only. Everybody around here has the flu this week, it seems, a i i a hy, triple-congested kind of flu that leaves the average person unable to discern between lemonade and a great vintage of Chateau dYquem, between broiled calfs pancreas and a big old chunk of tofu. Arerr you glad there are some foods you can taste no matter what? JANUARY 9 15, 1998 LA WEEKLY 51.