Last night I dined with a friend at Inko Nito in DTLA. I googled best new restaurants in DTLA and stumbled upon this new-fangled robata bar. First, as you can likely tell from this blog, Japanese food is my favorite, so I was really looking forward to this meal after visiting the Jasper Johns exhibit at the Broad right beforehand. The atmosphere is urban chic with hard concrete floors creating a noisy environment. It was hard for me to actually hear the person right next to me. That said, we sat at the bar, which is what I wanted to do because l love to see the chefs cooking, and it also helped to warm me up because the space was pretty chilly.
The best small plate by far was the beef short ribs, which were exceptionally tender, and while I usually cut out all fatty parts from my meat, I ate the fat in the ribs. It was tender, and the spicy chunks of peanut and chili oil were a great compliment. I almost ordered a second portion of this. I would give this single dish a 9.5 out of ten.
The panko crusted chicken with chili yogurt sauce was well-prepared, not greasy and had just the right amount or crunch. The bone marrow with white toast was like a sweet teriyaki and chives version of the classic Italian dish, and I think I prefer the classic Italian version, but this was good. The crab tartar with a wasabi sauce served with fried chicken skin as crackers was really original and had a pleasant burn on the finish. Our waiter touted the cauliflower as the best dish on the menu, but for me, it was just average. Some nice Asian spices and the creamy sauce made it a bit better than average, but for my money, I prefer the cauliflower at Baco Mercat. For once, I ordered dessert, which was coconut soft serve topped with toasted almonds and a salty burnt fortune cookie. I would describe this as a coconut version of salted caramel ice cream. It was pretty great and atypical, even if I did receive the weirdest fortune ever inside the cookie on top which said: “If you want pretty nurse you must be patient.” Not only a bad pun, but an awfully sexist thing for a piece of paper to tell me.
My least favorite dish here was the Chirashi—their take on sushi. It was bland and uninteresting, not to mention unattractive—the green sauce on the salmon/yellowtail one I ordered looked like old guacamole covering some fish. I recommend sticking to the meats here and having a cocktail. My Asian take on al old fashioned was excellent.
4 stars out of 5