RESTAURANT REVIEW / YUSHO : So-So Sushi : Yusho in Camarillo fails to measure up to the high praise of a faithful patron.

Perhaps he was sitting next to me at the sushi bar under the television set, watching Monday night football on the first night I ate there. Or maybe he was sitting near me on another night, in one of the blond wood booths on the side of the small dining room with the globe-shaped lights hanging from the ceiling.

It’s hard to know, since I’ve never met the man. But it was his articulate, enthusiastic, knowledgeable letter urging me to try Yusho that had propelled me to the restaurant.

If I had met him, at Yusho Japanese restaurant in El Paseo Camarillo shopping center in Camarillo, we’d probably have disagreed about the food.

And his letter showed me, again, that only a few things in this life are more certain than that two individuals will have three opinions about food.This man has apparently been a Yusho patron for the 10 years that it has been open and, in his letter, swears that, in all of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Ventura and “up and down the coast,” Yusho is the best.

Sir, I must respectfully disagree.

I do find the sushi bar OK--but just OK. The fresh fish was thinly sliced, but it seems to me that the rice is just a bit, shall we say, “grainier” than it should be. My Asian friends tell me that this is because it may have been cooked with too much water.

Neither is there anything spectacular or inventive about the sushi bar’s sushi rolls. I did enjoy the Philadelphia roll ($2.75), in which Philadelphia cream cheese is tucked inside salmon and avocado, giving the roll a different and unique flavor.

The salmon skin roll ($2.75) comes with lots of salmon--so much that I thought Jeff Kuge, sushi chef and co-owner with his brother Steve, had made a mistake. No mistake, just lots of salmon and very little of the crisp skin that this roll needs.

The Yusho house special roll ($4), with salmon, tuna and yellowtail, has an interesting touch, in that it is lightly deep-fried, tempura-style.

The New Zealand green mussels ($2.20), which can be so tender, were tough, and the sauce with them nondescript.

The Kuge brothers do a better job back in the kitchen than they do up front. Even so, if I had to look for one problem in nearly all of the Yusho food, I’d say it was simply a lack of flavor. Much of the food is bland.

The yosenabe ($16.50 for the full dinner), a simmering broth with kelp, shrimp, tofu, vegetables, oysters, scallops and chicken, is just plain dull.

But you do get all the traditional Japanese forerunners in ample servings with the dinner, including chicken yakitori, tender and skewered and covered with a tasty teriyaki sauce. Then there’s the miso soup, sunomono (pickled cucumbers), tsukemono (pickled cabbage), and shrimp and vegetable tempura. All of Yusho’s shrimp, however, seem pasty and rubbery.

The tonkatsu dinner ($13)--deep-fried pork cutlet, sliced--comes tender on the inside, crisp on the outside, with a savory tonkatsu sauce. The combination dinner of chicken teriyaki, spareribs and tempura, with vegetables ($14) has its pluses and minuses. The chicken, both dark and light meat, with skin left on, sliced and served in a nice teriyaki sauce, is one of the house’s best items. So are the spareribs, in the same sort of sauce. On this dinner, however, the tempura batter is flavorless, and the shrimp is its usual limp self.

* WHERE AND WHEN

Yusho Japanese restaurant, 330 N. Lantana St., Camarillo, 482-1739. Open for lunch Monday-Friday 11 a.m.-2 p.m., for dinner Monday-Thursday 5-9 p.m., Friday-Saturday 5-9:30 p.m. Beer and wine, reservations accepted, major credit cards accepted.