Description
The new Izakaya Fu-ga is one of those restaurants best stumbled into by accident: a tiny sign, a long stairway to a basement, and a glowing marble bar designed to accommodate both beer geeks and cocktail snobs.
If you are looking for traditional izakaya cooking, a roster of simmered squid, cow tongue, and 12 kinds of seaweed, Fu-ga may not quite be the restaurant for you. This is a place to go for slightly evolved bar food: french fries tossed with crumbled nori and enough garlic to stun an eel; panko-crusted calamari steak with blue cheese dressing; baked scallops in foil; fried chile shrimp wrapped in rice paper; and exotic sushi rolls of every description - Crunchy Dragon rolls, Kamikaze rolls and the like. (Izakaya Fu-ga is owned by the restaurant chain Shogun, which, to put it mildly, is not the same as being owned by Nobu.) But it's a fun place to drink; a good place to fall into for a glass of La Chouffe and a plate of edamame after a Dodger game or a play at the Taper. Even the third or fourth time around, Fu-ga seems like a discovery, a small piece of a better downtown preserved 20 feet underground.
