The Second Street Counter: Sushi Gen

Little Tokyo is one of the few downtown neighborhoods that still feeds people according to a craft rather than a trend. Along East Second Street, in the modest confines of Honda Plaza, Sushi Gen has stood since 1980 as the lunch that serious eaters in Los Angeles recommend to one another when they want fish, rice, and no ceremony that has to be explained. The surrounding blocks are a working Japanese American district: markets, bookstores, offices, visitors from the courts and City Hall a short walk west. The people in line at eleven-thirty are chefs on their day off, attorneys, couples who planned the wait, and regulars who already know which pieces they will point to when they reach the wood.

The interior is the old sushi-bar interior that newer rooms imitate and rarely equal: wood paneling, a counter where the work is visible, tables for those who are not sitting in front of the itamae. The lighting is honest. The room is calm once you are seated. There are no tasting-menu theatrics and no requirement that you surrender the order to a single prescribed procession. That is the diamond. Lunch sets—sashimi and sushi combinations that have been famous in this city for a generation—are the reason the line forms. Fatty tuna, halibut, scallop, uni when it is worthy, and rice seasoned as if someone still tastes it every morning: that is the meal. Chirashi is the right choice if you want breadth without negotiating every piece. Sit at the bar if you can. Watch the hands. Eat in the order the fish asks for.

What Sushi Gen gives you instead of a fashionable omakase is authorship you can afford at noon and skill you can taste without a preface. The house does not take lunch reservations. The wait is the filter and the tradition. Beer and wine are enough. The benefit is purity of purpose. You came to eat fish prepared by people who have been doing this in the same neighborhood for more than four decades. Comfort here is the comfort of competence, of a clean counter, of a meal that ends when the rice is gone and the afternoon can begin.

The cons are the cons of a beloved craft room. You will wait, especially on Friday. Parking in Little Tokyo is a puzzle; the Gold Line and a short walk are often the kinder arrival. English at the counter is functional rather than elaborately hospitable. The restaurant’s lunch window is finite, and it is closed at the beginning of the week. Guests who wanted plush banquettes and a captain explaining every course will be happier in a hotel. Guests who wanted the fish will not.

Sushi Gen is a Citywide Spotlight Lunch Diamond because it is unique to Little Tokyo, privately devoted to a single craft, a la carte rather than a tasting performance, and still the standard against which downtown midday sushi is measured. Choosing it is choosing tradition in the strict sense: a counter, a knife, rice, and the discipline of doing one thing exceptionally well while the rest of the city is still deciding what lunch is supposed to mean.