I said I would post a restaurant report from Los Angeles in December today and by gum, there’s still a few minutes left in the day!

As I’ve noted before, a few years ago my mother-in-law upped and moved from her home in Koreatown to a retirement community in Seal Beach. This means—horrors!—that our base of operations in southern California is now in Orange County. On the other hand, we are now much more apt to eat in the South Bay cities of Torrance and Gardena, where some of the best Japanese food in the greater LA area can be found. I’ve previously reported on a number of sushi, ramen, yakitori etc. meals eaten in these cities. Here now is a quick look at another meal in Gardena: a very nice lunch at Toshi Sushi.

Located, like so many good sushi restaurants in Los Angeles, in an unassuming strip mall, Toshi Sushi is a bright space with quite a few tables in the large dining room. There’s a small sushi bar as well but it wasn’t getting much action at lunch on a weekday. We took a table at the end of the restaurant and took stock of the menu. True to their name, they do serve a lot of sushi but that’s not all they do. The menu includes many of the greatest hits of the Japanese restaurant repertoire and they have a lot of attractive combinations, especially at lunch. We mostly ate some of these combinations.

The younger boy got one of their lunch combinations. You can choose two dishes to pair in this combination: he picked the chicken teriyaki and the shrimp and vegetable tempura. Miso soup and rice also come with. The older boy and I got the sushi combination, a very good deal at $29.50 for eight pieces of nigiri (tai/bream, bigeye tuna, hamach/yellowtail, salmon, salmon belly, albacore, chutoro and ikura/salmon roe); it also included some very nice sunomono with octopus. I added a piece of uni on to my combination and later we got a few more pieces as well—spicy tuna cut roll for him and saba (mackerel), hotate (scallop), tamago (rolled omelet) and a yellowtail hand roll for me.

The missus meanwhile splurged on the lunch special omakase, which is also a very good deal at $65. Like the sushi combination, it comes with a salad but adds the following on: clam-miso soup, grilled black cod, chawanmushi and mochi ice cream. It also includes eight pieces of nigiri but these are a more premium selection than on the regular sushi combination. On the day it included a very nice piece of kinmedai (goldeneye snapper).

For a look at the restaurant and everything we ate, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down to see what we made of the meal as a whole and to see how much it cost.

The restaurant was not busy and service was very attentive and also very friendly. I won’t make huge claims for the quality of the fish but it was all quite good—and we’d kill to have sushi of this quality available in the Twin Cities, especially at these prices. For all of the above plus tax and tip we paid just over $60/head. Not cheap but a good value for a sushi-centered meal these days in the US. (Let’s not think about the fact that this is the price we paid for an excellent omakase at Manten-Sushi in Tokyo last summer…) Indeed, after I returned to Delhi a few days later, the boys and the missus came back to Toshi Sushi for another lunch and enjoyed that very much too.

Okay, at some point tomorrow (Monday) I will post my next report from either Delhi or Bombay. Got to keep these catch-up reports coming!