We were in Los Angeles for a little short of two weeks at the end of December and early January and, as usual, ate somewhat excessively. Reports on most of those meals will show up on the blog over the next month or so, though not in sequence. First up is the meal we were looking forward to the most: dinner at Shunji.
Shunji opened a little less than three years ago and in pretty short order rocketed to near the top of Los Angeles’s sushi scene (probably the best in the United States); most of the cognoscenti rank it in the tier below Urasawa (a restaurant I am unlikely to eat at in the foreseeable future). We ate their lunch special “omakase” this summer and while it was good we were not blown away (we both thought Kiriko’s lunch special, on this trip and previous, was far superior). When I said as much on Chowhound’s Los Angeles forum a lot of people insisted that the measure of Shunji cannot be taken without doing their full-on dinner omakase. Frankly, based on the nature of some of the conversation, I think there’s a bit of “Shunji’ism” at play on the Chowhound LA forum, but the point was well-taken and so we resolved to do the full omakase on this trip. And so we did. And it was a very good meal. But, again, it didn’t rise to the level of a transcendental experience—more on this below.
