"Only the BEST" could be the motto of Restaurant Shiro. Each day chef/owner Hideo Yamashiro ("Shiro") personally gets up early in the morning and journeys to the Los Angeles fish market to choose the best possible fish for his namesake restaurant. If an ingredient isn't good enough, it isn't bought.
Such
dedication to excellence is rarely found, but it has paid off in the many
accolades received by the restaurant:
Just
one year after opening in 1986, Shiro's entered the top 15 restaurants
(for food - "extraordinary to perfection") in the highly acclaimed Zagat
Guide and has remained there ever since. In 1996 the restaurant was rated
number 1 for food in all of Los Angeles.
"If God cooked fish, this is how it would taste." -- Zagat Survey, 1993 |
 |
"The
cuisine at Shiro reflects a beautiful Japanese simplicity, its clean ingredients
of the Pacific subtly enhanced by classical French cooking techniques and
sauces. In the tradition of a truly accomplished kitchen, the menu changes
nightly, but the integrity of this theme unfailingly remains intact."
"Shiro,
a Japanese-French bistro unaccountably tucked into a midwestern-looking
South Pasadena streetscape, serves so much of this ponzu-steeped [catfish]
that it might as well rename itself Shiro: The House of Sizzling Catfish.
Its version of the dish -- imagine a whole catfish the size of the shark from Jaws stuffed with ginger and fried to a crisp -- is everything you could ever want from a bottom feeder."
-- Los Angeles Times
"Shiro is, genuinely, one of the restaurants that make life in Southern California so very . . . livable."
"Last
week in Monterey, I ate in a restaurant that all the foodies love. (In
the latest Zagat 
guide
for San Francisco, it rates 26 points, the same as Campton Place and Chez
Panisse.)
. . . . I ordered lobster ravioli in a cream-drenched sauce. As I tasted the overstuffed, oversauced little packets, I kept thinking to myself, 'If only these were as good as the Chinese ravioli filled with shrimp and salmon mousse that I ate at Restaurant Shiro a couple of days ago.'"
-- Ruth Reichl for the Los Angeles Times
Ruth Reichl is currently
editor of Gourmet Magazine
"
. . . anyone who appreciates the freshest of fish, sensitively cooked and
dressed with artful sauces, should seek out this rewarding restaurant."
-- Gourmet Magazine
"The
seafood salads; the whole catfish in ponzu sauce; the fresh fish
in simple, flawless 
French
sauces; and the pretty desserts . . . . A bargain by expensive-restaurant
standards."
-- Westways Magazine
"We should have many Shiros (the restaurant) in the suburbs. There are pitifully few that come close. There probably would be plenty of them if only we could dig up more Shiros (the chef)."
" . . . the perfect city restaurant in the suburbs."
"When I was 16, I was working at a hospital for a summer. A salesman came and took our office out to a nice dinner at Shiros. I loved it, it was the first really nice restaurant I'd ever been to. I completely forgot the name of it and then ten years later I went back last night. I didn't have a clue it was the same restaurant until I saw your catfish. You were classy then and you're still classy now. So thank you for not changing and bringing back an old, treasured memory."