Totoraku

Thanks to Yelp and food bloggers, Totoraku (aka “Pico Teriyaki House” or “Secret Beef Restaurant”) is now the worst kept secret in Los Angeles.

Despite being so well known, reservations still seem pretty hard to come by at Totoraku since only regulars and recipients of Chef Kaz Oyama’s business cards can make reservations. Once you make it to Oyama’s table and express genuine appreciation for his cuisine, he will undoubtedly extend you one of these coveted invites.

Sound a little pretentious? Hardly. Oyama’s place is all about the food and there is nothing in the décor or the way you are impeccably served that is uptight or snooty. (I’m told by my friend, a close friend of the Oyama family and a regular at Totoraku, that Chef Oyama is selective about his diners because he understands that his cuisine will not be for everyone’s palate.) In fact, this little place is a family owned and operated restaurant with modest chairs and tables that you might find at a local mom-pop sushi-ya. When you walk in, you are warmly greeted like a long and sorely missed family member whose come by for Tuesday dinner.

Before you even enter, preparations for your arrival were being made. Your table is set and waiting for you, unlike many other restaurants that take reservations but rarely reserve your table. A trio of dipping sauces is laid out: sesame oil with salt, lemon juice, and soy sauce. The server will make recommendations on which sauce to pair your meat with.

Be warned, reservations are required. The door is literally shut and locked to you unless you have a reservation.

After you’re seated, the servers quickly but unobtrusively attend to you. Without having to ask for it, ice cold water is brought to the table. The server asks, in the typically polite and delicate sing-songy cadence that Japanese-speaking natives have mastered, if you would like your wine/sake opened. (This place s BYO booze, so you’re welcome to bring as much as you like.)

For the first half of our dinner, we picked up a bottle of Hakkaisan Tokubetsu Junmai from the local Japanese market. Since it wasn’t cold, we asked that it be chilled. Instead, our server graciously offered a trade. A bottle of Totoraku’s already chilled bottle of Hakkaisan for our warm bottle. With that, I knew we were definitely going to have a flawless night of superior service.

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Just after our first round of sake was poured, a long tray of nine appetizers was brought to the table. Each portion was truly bite-size but full of its own distinct flavors.

1. Lobster topped with caviar

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2. Hard boiled deviled quail eggs with crab and truffle oil

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3. Monkfish liver with secret dressing, and 4. Uni stuffed monkfish

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5. Asparagus with butter foam

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6. Chopped marinated Matsutake mushroom

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7. Steamed abalone with truffle oil and okra

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8. Sockeye salmon with avocado and cold soba noodles

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9. Mango with pancetta and truffle oil

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Our first official omakase dish was the short rib beef carpaccio with assorted flowers, spring onions and carrots, drizzled with olive oil and salt. Devine. The marbled meat was tender and fell apart along the many fat lines but still managed to taste light and fresh, with the small bits of kosher salt bringing out a natural sweetness in the beef. It was both beautiful to look at and eat.

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This light and subtle carpaccio was followed by an order of sliced raw beef liver. For those who have never sampled this delicacy before, there are special enzymes present in raw beef liver that don’t yet exist in your body. So, you are cautioned to try only one or two slices to get these enzymes into your immune system. Once in for a few days, you’ll be good to eat as much as you like on a return visit, provided that the liver is only of the freshest quality. (Japan recently banned serving raw liver due to several food poisoning cases, which unfortunately resulted in some fatalities. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120702a7.html#.T_s8jI60bww)

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Like many, I tried cooked liver in one form or another. Trying it raw was an interesting and enjoyable experience for me. The texture was firmer than raw beef but just on the outer most part. Once you bit through the liver, the inside was delightfully squishy. Overall, it felt like you were eating a slightly undercooked meat flavored jello shot. (ok – maybe that was not the most flattering description but I swear, it was amazing!)

The flavor was distinctly liver but extremely gentle. It wasn’t at all the rough and overpowering taste you get with cooked liver. Another sign that the raw liver could stand on its own in terms of taste and quality? The preparation. All it needed was a light dip in sesame oil, with a small dab of salt, fresh grated ginger and radish. As with most liver dishes, however, a little goes a long way and after my fourth or fifth slice, I had to move on because I was beginning to feel the heavy richness of the liver… and because I was only supposed to have two slices anyway as a raw liver newbie.

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The third dish was beef tataki. The meat was slightly less tender than the carpaccio but more flavorful due to the light searing. When combined with the sesame oil and salt, the richness of the meat came through and every morsel was mouthwatering.

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Fourth was another Japanese delicacy: beef throat sashimi. I believe the portion we got was one cow’s worth but the yield was only about 6 – 8 slices, so not much throat per cow. The beef throat taste was more concentrated than the carpaccio but had much more texture. You could feel your teeth puncture the meat and it required more chewing but wasn’t at all chewy. The seasame oil and salt dip helped to round out the meaty aroma. It was interesting but not my favorite.

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Fifth was the beef tartare, which consisted of a raw egg, radish, cilantro, carrots, onions and long slim strips of beef, for you to mix and consume at the table. The beef was tender but lacked to complexity of the other dishes. Also, because it was cut in long strips, it was missing that fine ground tartare consistency that I customarily associate with beef tartare. In fact, the beef tartare was more akin to a light beef salad than a tartare.

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Sixth came the vegetables. Carrot and daikon sticks, lettuce, and cilantro with a side of miso paste for dipping. At first I thought “meh, vegetables” but after a bite of the crunchy moisture-filled daikon dipped in the miso paste, I thought “WOW!” It was so refreshing and a nice way to clean my palate as we moved away from the raw items. The miso paste was salty, and actually on the verge of too salty, but when mixed with the clean and crisp vegetables, it was a perfect compliment.

Seventh was a small bowl of quartered Momotaro tomatoes. I suspect they were tossed with some rice wine vinegar and sesame seeds. After they got to sit and stew in their own juices, the tomatoes softened so that when you bite into it, you got a surprising and pleasing burst of sweet and tangy juice and pulp.

After seven courses and a tray of nine appetizers, we are finally ready to transition to the grilled meats. Of course, this means we need to abandon the Hakkaisan and move on to red… and WHAT AN AMAZING RED IT IS! When my friend offered to bring the wine, I had no idea what a treat I was in for. I already knew that the meal would be spectacular from the many reviews but I was so floored and ecstatic to see that we were having a wine of equal caliber.

Just as our first drops of Opus One are being poured, out comes the grill. It’s awesome. It looks like the casing of an industrial car battery that’s been hollowed out, filled with hot coals, and a wire grid. It’s so awesome that I kick around the idea of building my own portable grill but quickly have images of roaring flames on my balcony, uncontrolled smoke and a possible explosion that might warrant unwanted attention from the neighbors and some members of law enforcement so… that idea promptly gets filed in the “Do Not Attempt” folder.

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By now, we are one bottle of sake deep and my taste buds are feeling sluggish. The remaining dishes come out quickly and all I hear is tongue, filet, inside rib-eye, outside rib-eye, meat, meat, meat. I’m completely overwhelmed at this point and have lost track at the rate things are getting put on the grill and on my plate. I am also completely taken by this Opus One, which has sidelined my focus on the food, including my food photography skills. I think I’ve ordered the photos properly but am going to need a 2nd visit to Totoraku to confirm.

Course eight was the beef tongue. It’s actually the first time I’ve had beef tongue and it tasted nothing like I expected. It was amazingly soft, fatty and not chewy in the slightest. While it was delicious it was so heavy (and I was so heavy with food) that eating more than two slices was just out of the question.

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Ninth was the filet mignon, which was accompanied by a side of shishito peppers, white onions, tomato wedges, and a dish of kimchi. The filet was INCREDIBLE, my absolute favorite of all the cooked meats. Indescribably tender and thick cut of meat, you forget all else. It was probably the most harmonious bite I had of any of the grilled meats.

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Tenth was the inside rib-eye. Eleventh, the outside rib-eye… and other than the thickness and minor differential in fattiness, I was quickly slipping into food euphoria and could barely tell the difference between the two.

Twelfth was the skirt steak, which was very similar to the steak tartare. Once cooked, you could notice how fiberous the cuts were. You wouldn’t normally notice at all compared to other cuts of skirt steak, but for the fact that all the other previous courses of beef were so exceptional.

Our last dish was a mild yet spicy Japanese egg soup.

Dessert was a pairing of raspberry and lychee sorbet. By now, I’ve checked out entirely and my belly is basically the biggest part of me. Its been a great night and if I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was either my birthday or Christmas.

I am one happy girl… one sleepy, full but happy girl.