Yatai, West Hollywood 

Yatai

The former Hama and Katsuya general manager, Masa Sonobe and the chef, Koji Miyamoto(Koi & Sushiroku) teamed up and opened this an intimate neighborhood restaurant specializing in Asian food such as Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese and Indonesian dishes.

The similarity between the Spanish tapas bar and the Japanese izakaya has been long noted - both are places where the cooking is subsidiary to the drinking, where immoderate consumption is both encouraged and facilitated, and where the portions are just big enough to get you through to the next glass. Yatai, a pleasantly sleek patio restaurant tucked away off the Sunset Strip, is a Japanese izakaya pretending to be an American joint pretending to be an izakaya, if you know what I mean, although the putative concept is Asian street food. (The only "street foods" you'll find here are the sticks of satay and the deep-fried Japanese potato balls stuffed with bits of octopus tentacle.) The customers, most of whom seem to be Japanese-speaking hipsters, groove on the Indonesian gado-gado, the chicken dumplings with Thai curry, the samosas and the gooey, apple-spiked "Korean-style" sashimi (like a simplified version of yook hwe made with raw tuna instead of raw beef) as much as they do on the soy-paper sushi rolls, the tempura and the plum-infused ochazuke. Yatai has the usual shortlist of soju cocktails and Pacific Rim wines, but there is also a nicely edited selection of cold sakes. I liked the Tomoju, which had a faint but distinct aftertaste of the wax lips you probably used to chew on as a kid.

Designed to imitate the look and feel of an open-air street vendor in Asia (called a yatai), this tapas bar serves Asian cuisine in a traditional setting. Guests can choose from hot and cold plates including barbecue eel skewers, kara-age (fried chicken), monsoon ceviche, and bite-size rib-eye steak. Wine, beer and soju are also served.