Obscure Westside Restaurant Named Among World's Best Eateries

LOS ANGELES, CA — If you live on the Westside, there's a pretty good chance you've driven past the restaurant deemed one of the best — not just in Los Angeles but in the world — without ever noticing it. It's the Japanese restaurant n/naka, and the Overland Avenue eatery in Palms was named one of the world's 30 best eateries Tuesday by Travel + Leisure and Food & Wine magazines.

The restaurant is tucked into a nondescript gray slab of a building sandwiched between a psychic, some apartment buildings, an outpatient clinic and a strip mall anchored by a laundromat. It's when you set foot inside and take your seat that you enter a whole new world. The top 30 list was curated by James Beard Award-winning writer Besha Rodell, who has been reporting on food and culture for nearly two decades across two continents. Currently the dining critic for the New York Times' Australia bureau, Rodell accepted recommendations from a global panel of about two dozen experts across the hospitality and restaurant industries, according to the magazines that collaborated on the project. Rodell didn't need to be told about n/naka. She's been eating there for years, and the experience is poetry, she said.

Rodell anonymously visited 81 restaurants in two dozen countries and across six continents over a four-month period, staying in 37 hotels, and spending 279 hours in the air. To complete this project, she's traveled more than 100,000 miles, according to the introduction published in both magazines. Her mission? "To discover the best restaurants that travelers must visit right now. As much about the destinations as it is about the food, this list aims to reflect the most vibrant aspects of each location it represents, capturing dining experiences that fully express the culture of each country, city, or region."

The list is divided into five geographic areas: North America; South America; Africa/Middle East; Asia/Australia; and Europe.

Of n/naka, which opened in 2011, Rodell wrote: "I said it the first time I ate at n/naka more than five years ago, and I'll say it again now: meals at Niki Nakayama's small, elegant restaurant unfold like poetry, flavors and dishes acting as phrases and stanzas in one long, lyrical, and utterly profound experience."

The Southland-born chief, who works alongside her sous chef wife Carole Iida-Nakayama, spent years in Japan training in the art of kaiseki, a traditional, multi-course Japanese style of dining that focuses on seasonality and ritual, to perfect "an intensely personal version ... that is almost as Californian as it is Japanese," Rodell wrote.

She concluded her review this way: "Almost all of the restaurants selected for this list are highly representative of their locations, a way of tasting the true nature of a place through its dining. So why, in Los Angeles, choose a restaurant that looks to Japan for much of its inspiration? Because L.A.'s greatest asset is its diversity and its cultivation of culture that blurs the lines of influence and origin and arrives at something wholly new.

"N/naka is not a restaurant that would exist anywhere else: a chef born in Southern California but trained in Japan, working in a format traditionally reserved for men, growing her own produce and paying homage to the incredible edible bounty that's possible in this specific part of the world."

Rodell isn't the first to notice n/naka, the 2019 Michelin Guide gave the restaurant two stars. "I just want to say: We're a team of 20, with 13 girls and seven men," a tearful Niki Nakayama told the Los Angeles Times earlier this year. "California is a state of dreams, and our restaurant could only exist in California."

Related: Westside Eatery Earns Stars In 2019 Michelin Guide

City News Service and Patch Staffer Paige Austin contributed to this report.