Pacific Asian Plaza is home to Penang, our best Malaysian restaurant; Ay Chung Café, a Taiwan-based café where you can eat oyster pancakes and various tropical slushes; Hue Thai’s, our best place for banh mi, or Vietnamese-style sandwiches; and various bakeries, markets and karaoke establishments. You feel like you need a passport to stop by. It’s as close to San Gabriel Valley pan-Asian craziness as anything Vegas offers.
Now comes Bazic, which bills itself as a fusion restaurant, but which is really Japanese filtered through Korean sensibilities. The specialty here is something the menu calls “bbq olive luxury chicken.” Don’t try to decode the meaning. What they are putting out is fried chicken with a crisp crust that it gets from being deep-fried in olive oil. Only in the weird Generation Y world of Asian dining could fried chicken turn into a health food.
I don’t know how they achieve it, because olive oil has a notoriously low flash point, or temperature at which the oil begins to smoke. But what you get here is wonderful chicken—golden, tender and moist—inside a panko, or Japanese-style bread-crumb coating. This chicken comes in several incarnations. You can get up to 17 pieces for $23.95—take that, Colonel—or the 10- or 20-piece barbecue wings.
One of the ways you can eat this chicken is to order the mixed sweet-and-spicy special chicken, fried chicken coated in a red, sticky sweet-and-sour sauce. Purists—or wimps—can have their chicken marinated and grilled, sans breading. Come on, live a little.
At lunch, when the restaurant offers a Japanese-style setto, or set lunch, you get a two-piece combo, a leg and thigh, a bowl of white rice, potato soup and Korean-style pickles, for only $7.95. Evenings, the chicken is basically served à la carte.
Bazic is modest in terms of the décor. Tables and chairs are covered in black leather, and overhead there are plastic leaves and flowers on a makeshift trellis. An eight-stool bar is stocked with contraptions like giant beakers in a high-school chemistry lab, equipped with spigots to dispense beer on draft. A team of young, trilingual (English, Japanese and Korean) servers will take your order, and the kitchen will probably take its time to produce it.
In fact, this is a tale of two restaurants, one at lunch, the other at dinner. The restaurant offers a ridiculously low-priced set during lunch, when the more extensive dinner menu is unavailable. The restaurant serves tonkatsu, breaded Japanese pork cut into thin strips, for only $5.99, on a wire mesh plate flanked by a bowl of steamed white rice, jalapeno, cubes of pickled radish, miso soup and cabbage salad smeared with a creamy dressing. You get a ceramic bowl filled with sesame seeds and a wooden muddler to smash them with, the better to add the restaurant’s murky, mysterious homemade tonkatsu sauce. I am partial to the combination lunches, especially ones that give you the chicken or pork with udon or roe rice, along with the other side dishes.
Udon, or Japanese noodles, are wheat noodles in a rich, salty broth. Roe rice comes in a heated crock so that the rice can get crusty around the side. The rice comes blanketed with tobiko, flying-fish roe, yellow picked radish, thinly sliced cucumber, grilled mushroom and sesame seeds. (Koreans love to put sesame seeds and sesame oil on practically anything.) The idea is to mix it all up like bi bim bap, the famous Korean one-pot lunch. As a side dish, it’s dynamite.
Come after 4 p.m., though, when local Koreans are here to drink those giant beakers of beer or soju, Korean rice wine, and there is a different menu and chef. There is something called “lunch box” in English, paradoxically not served during lunch, a tray filled with eggs, salty fish, pickles and steamed rice, and spicy ramen, garlicky noodles in broth.
Stirred clams are done with mushrooms and garlic, and there are chicken gizzards, too, as well as pub dishes popular in Japan and Korea, such as fried sweet potato, spicy stir-fried squid and octopus and various forms of Korean barbecue. The best-known is the rather workmanlike bulgogi, barbecued beef with the texture of the meat in a Philadelphia cheese steak, with a flavor achieved through adding around 20 cloves of garlic.
For dessert, there is cheesecake and green-tea ice cream, but the best sweet I tried here was actually pomegranate lemonade, refreshing and pungent in a sugar-rimmed glass. I’ll be visiting this mall again, soon and often. These guys do chicken right.
Bazic
5115 Spring Mountain Road. 642-8888.
Lunch 11 a.m.-4 p.m. daily; dinner 4-11 p.m. daily.
Suggested dishes: olive chicken lunch set, $7.95; well-being pork cutlet, $5.99; roe rice and chicken combo lunch, $9.99; pomegranate lemonade, $3.