By Sheila Himmel
Mercury News
Published: Friday, November 1, 1996

How La Mission Center got its linguistically incorrect name, no one cares. How this little mall deep in the heart of Blossom Valley got one of the best sushi places in the Bay Area is not important either. All that matters is: It is worth a trip.

Tomo Sushi is set in the corner of this L-shaped center, near where the mission bell apparently used to hang. Tomo (being a short form of tomodachi, friendship) is quiet, welcoming, comfortable, a good friend you would naturally drive a bit to see, or visit often if you lived nearby.

Jun June opened here in June 1995. He had worked for nine years in other restaurants around the Bay Area, but chose South San Jose in his first outing as an owner.

A spicy special

He sometimes customizes dishes for customers. In one case, a bet among patrons on the Stanford-San Jose State football game prompted him to invent a spicy bicultural maki sushi roll, San Jose Ole. A cone-shaped hand roll of yellowtail, albacore, green leaf lettuce and hot peppers ($3.50), the Ole brings a disorienting, overpowering chile taste to the land of exquisite subtlety.

San Francisco's namesake is a perfectly delicious mix of umagi, snow crab and avocado ($4.25 for the regular roll). We passed on the other city entry, the Philadelphia: salmon, avocado and cream cheese.

So June has his fun, but like a good friend, he's serious when you need him to be. We started with a daily special, Ankimo ($4.25), a monkfish pate to die for. To achieve this incredible, traditional Japanese dish, June marinates the monkfish's little livers for one hour in mirin, the sweet, low-alcohol Japanese rice wine. Then he takes a bamboo roller to shape the pate in rounds, and steams it for an hour.

Delicate as mousse, it is sliced and set on pickled daikon and scallions in a soy-ginger sauce you'll want to drink up, with garnishes of seaweed slivers and daikon sprouts.

Nice contrasts

For the salmon-skin roll ($3.50), June broils smoked salmon skin and rolls it with scallions, English cucumbers, carrots and shaved bonito. These add crunchiness and a salty bite to the sweet, sticky rice.

The Spider roll ($7.50) is good, too, with deep-fried soft-shell crab that is fresh and tasty.

On the nigiri side of the menu, where hand-molded seasoned rice is topped, rather than filled (and June leaves a little extra flap of seaweed flying free) we were most impressed with the Hotate ($3.50). This is composed of raw scallops and flying fish eggs in a mayonnaise and scallion sauce. It looks like a tiny serving of something that would bubble over, like macaroni and cheese, but the taste is from another dimension.

The Hamachi ($3.50) is a smooth and creamy yellowtail, the Namaniku intensely sesame-flavored raw ground beef ($3.25), the Amaebi ($4.25) a treat of sweet shrimp in which the head is fried and served along with the raw body on rice.

In between bites of fish, June's carpaccio-thin pickled ginger refreshes the palate.

We had tea, but of course there are Sapporo, Kirin and Asahi beer; hot sake and cold sake on tap, chardonnay, chablis and plum wine. In addition to the sushi menu, there is teriyaki, donburi, udon, tempura, lunch box combinations and a children's plate (tempura, teriyaki and ice cream, $6.50).