They Skewer Everything in Sight at Sakura House

Sakura House. Could a Japanese restaurant have a more hackneyed name? It’s like being a Chinese restaurant called the Golden Pagoda.

But the rest of its name--Sizzling Skewers of Kushiyaki--indicates we’re not in for sushi and tempura. In Japan, kushiyaki means seafood grilled on skewers. This place gives the skewer treatment to everything you can imagine, even eggs, nuts and chicken skin.

At first glance, it looks rather like a sushi parlor, with unadorned white walls and a central work station surrounded by a crescent-shaped counter. Instead of a cutting board, it has a grill attended by an imperturbable kushiyaki chef in a happi coat. Sakura House really is something like a sushi place too, though rather quieter--the menu is mostly exquisite little mouthfuls, and you can find yourself ordering item after item, with only the accumulating empty skewers to remind you how much you’ve eaten.

You start out with a little dish of cabbage and sliced carrot and radish with some sweetish bean sauce. From this point, you can order skewers from the a la carte menu (minimum three skewers per diner) or from a whiteboard of specials, or get one of the four set dinners. One good reason to consider the aki dinner: It includes soft-shell crab.

There are regular skewers and then there are maki skewers, which are wrapped with a paper-thin sheet of pork before being grilled--it shrink-wraps deliciously onto the skewer as it cooks. Most of the maki skewers are vegetables. Okra-maki is sweet (and not gluey), the string bean-maki is more flavorful than the asparagus, and garlic sprout-maki is rather chewy, though it leaves a garlic greens aftertaste. The best maki for my money is cherry tomatoes, three to a skewer. Just let them rest a couple of minutes before biting into them, or you’ll get scalded.

The maki-less skewers include some plain nude vegetables, such as bell peppers and eggplant slices (which seem to have a bit of teriyaki flavor), but this is where you find straight meat skewers, such as shrimp, scallops or beef with garlic (lots of garlic). Garlic lamb is two sweet little chops to a skewer. One of the best things here is squid with shiso leaf--it looks like a skewer of bone-white miniature truck tires with green axles--because of the refreshing sweetness of shiso. On special I once found a skewer of bits of chicken breast rolled up around garlic, shiso and a tiny bit of salted plum.

In the Japanese Dainties section of the menu, you find a range of oddities from gizzards to a sort of garlicky frankfurter skewered with onion. You can get hard-boiled quail eggs on a skewer, or ginkgo nuts (they look like giant chartreuse ants’ heads and have pleasant mild nutty flavor, a little smoky from the grill). Chicken skin is a narrow strip of skin accordion-pleated onto a skewer--in effect, crackling made in an unaccustomedly neat, precise sort of way.

I had come here several times before I got beyond the skewers, and there turn out to be quite a few interesting items over there among the salads and rice and noodle dishes. A salad of three kinds of sweet, crunchy seaweed tossed with greens in sesame dressing. Rich, sweet broiled eel served on rice. Custardy fried tofu in broth, topped with finely grated radish.

Occasionally an interesting appetizer shows up on the whiteboard, such as crispy chicken addiction: three big chunks of breaded chicken breast fried very brown--definitely crisp--with a tiny lick of sweet bean sauce.

Japanese restaurants are not really known for dessert, but Sakura House breaks the stereotype here too. I’ve had a soft, eggy cappuccino custard, an espresso ice cream with a powerful coffee flavor and a green tea ice cream with a fruity sweetness like cherries. They’re so good I wish I’d tried the berry cobbler that was on the whiteboard one night.

Sakura House is at the tip of that long finger of Culver City that wanders deep into Santa Monica, almost to Lincoln Boulevard. A word about the parking lot it shares: I’ve seen a car parked blocking a parked police car, that’s how crowded it can get.

Sakura House, 13362 Washington Blvd., Culver City. (310) 306-7010. Dinner 5:30 to 10 p.m. Wednesdays through Mondays; closed Tuesdays and the last Monday of every month. Beer, wine and sake (only served cold). Parking lot. All major cards ($15 minimum). Dinner for two, $16-$57. What to get: crispy chicken addiction, seaweed salad, aki dinner, squid with shiso leaf, okra-maki, tomato-maki, broiled eel over rice bowl, espresso ice cream, green tea ice cream.