Gadling

Getting to the best sushi restaurant in suburban Los Angeles can be easy (when there’s no traffic, of course). From Downtown Los Angeles take highway 60 toward Pomona, driving through East Los Angeles and the fictitious-sounding Avocado Heights, past the green, well-manicured tombstone-studded hill known as Rose Hills cemetery (where gangster rapper Eazy-E is buried). Continue cruising past the endless strip malls of Puente and boxy shopping malls and neon chain store signs, which morph into Chinese language signs about five miles later. After the town of Industry, the butt of many jokes on the TV show Arrested Development, and Diamond Bar, switch over to highway 71 toward Corona.

A few miles down highway 71, get off at Chino Hills Parkway, take a right and pull into the first strip mall you see. Welcome to Chino Hills, home of Hayaci, the best sushi in suburban Los Angeles.

For the uninitiated, this isn’t the California where people come to reach for the stars. It’s the California of commuters; it’s the part of the state, wedged somewhere between Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties, where residents have sacrificed location for a bigger house at a more affordable price; the California where the only “mom and pop” shops left are madre y padre shops, selling better-than-average tacos and, on the weekends, menudo. Like, say, coastal California there are a lot of hotel rooms here. But not for tourism: people come to Chino to visit relatives in the California State Prison (or you might find Republicans who have lost their way on a pilgrimage to the nearby Richard Nixon Presidential Library). Chino is the home of character Ryan Atwood on the TV show The O.C., portrayed as the antithesis of heavenly Newport Beach. The wrong side of the tracks.

Unless you’re a teenager who hasn’t reached driving age or a resident of the high-security prison, Chino and its younger sibling, Chino Hills, really isn’t the “wrong side of the tracks,” or hell on earth or anything like that. It’s just a normal suburban greater Los Angeles town.

But it’s not the type of town you’d expect to find Hayaci, a restaurant run by a Korean couple Jay and Stella. There are a gazillion sushi joints tucked away in a strip mall in southern California. But what makes Hayaci special is the price-quality ratio. Lunch for three people at Hayaci usually totals out at $50. The last time I ate about the equivalent quality of sushi in New York (at, say, Next Door Nobu) for three people, the bill was three times as high.

I usually go to Hayaci with Cathy, my sister, who lives in Chino Hills. She’s such a regular that she’s earned her chopsticks; meaning, when we walk in, Jay opens a cabinet door and pulls out a rectangular box that contains her very own pair of sticks. As soon as we sit down, Jay plops two pieces of albacore belly in front of us. But this isn’t just any ordinary piece of raw fish staring back at me–not just because the quality is high grade; but each piece of sushi is topped with sautéed garlic, adding a taste strata that you wouldn’t necessarily find in Japan, but is pure bliss on the taste buds.

After the albacore, we usually plow through a few of the house rolls (I love the “Crazy Rabbit Roll” which looks like a carrot, wrapped in fresh salmon with a stalk of lettuce poking out one side) and then always top off the meal with two more of those garlic-topped albacore sushi pieces.

I’ve been to Hayaci enough times–I was there three times last week–that Jay and Stella recognize me now. I’m the food and travel writing brother from New York. I suspect I’m a long way off from earning my own chopsticks. Which means I have a lot of driving on that stretch of highway 60 ahead of me.

Hayaci, 4200 Chino Hills Pkwy #870, Chino Hills, CA. 909-606-7866.