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Midday, this well-kept, refined Japanese restaurant swells with suits and ties sipping sake at wooden tables or lined up at the small sushi bar, over which dangle cartoonish models of blowfish. Dinner’s significantly calmer, often quiet enough to hear a sizzle from across the room as waitresses mix rice, seafood, and sweet sauce in an earthenware bowl for kamamechi—Japan’s answer to Korean bibimbap. Dishes clink as waitresses dressed in yukata, traditional Japanese robes, place them on tables already crowded with other small appetizers: Salty salmon roe topped with grated daikon radish, simple boiled octopus, and boiled scallions along with your choice of raw seafood, such as rich yellowtail or unusually tender giant clam. Crab dumplings have delicate skins and a crabmeat filling that’s sweet, briny—and real. These delicious and relatively typical home-style Japanese dishes have their atypical counterparts for adventurous palates: Salted sea slug intestines share the menu with hebo, described as "sweet young bee with honey soy sauce." Diminutive appetizer portions require ordering hearty main courses to fill up, like the fabulous tempura soba, a rich-broth soup with a tangle of bright green soba noodles perfumed with green tea. — JJ Goode

On Fridays at lunchtime, lines form for off-menu but beloved pork ramen and fresh soba noodles.

Crab shumai, $8; tempura soba, $15; sea urchin sushi roll, $9