This place has evolved into my favorite restaurant in West L.A. A small, crowded place that is immaculately clean yet somehow indescribably funky, Yabu is centered around an open kitchen surrounded by a bar where you can sit and watch the cool young pony-tailed Japanese chefs whip up noodles and sashimi right in your face. The chefs, the Japanese waiters with their poor English, and the decor (wall hangings and -- I love this part -- a shelf of explicitly phallic-shaped spice jars) combine to make you feel as if you're really in Tokyo, if only for an hour or so.
The first time I had soba, those thin, firm, pale brown buckwheat noodles, I didn't get it: eating a pile of cold noodles for dinner is a strange idea to Americans. It grew on me and now I'm addicted. Here's how I eat soba: they arrive on your table looking totally harmless on a little bamboo raft that lets the juices drain into the basket underneath, and next to them is placed a cup of salty dipping sauce, which is covered by a saucer holding sliced green onions and hot green wasabi mustard. Remove the saucer from the cup and, with your chopsticks, fling the green onions into the black dipping sauce underneath. Then take ALL THE FREAKIN' WASABI MUSTARD AND PUT IT IN THE SAUCE AND STIR. Be sure to mix until all the wasabi is dissolved, because if you swallow a lump, you will die my friend yes die die ha ha ha die. (At other places I've been to, it's very dangerous to put in all the wasabi mustard they give you, but at Yabu they carefully measure your portion.) Next, pick up a wad of cold noodles with your chopsticks, dunk them in the dipping sauce, remove them wet and dripping, and slurp those babies down (the menu specifically tells you that the noodles taste better if you make noise. They're serious.) Ooooh. The noodles provide the texture, and the wasabi and onions in the soy-based dipping sauce give just that extra zing you need. Zaru soba (with dried seaweed) and tanuki soba (with tempura batter flakes) are your best bets. But one dish of the stuff may leave you hungry for a little something extra...
The assorted tempura is great too, big shrimp and veggies in a thick, but light-tasting, coating of batter. The tenzaru soba, which is zaru soba with a side of tempura, is a great meal deal. Nikujaga can be described as beef stew with onions and potatoes, but it is nothing like the American version: a million times more refined, with thinly-sliced beef, a hunk of onion and potato in a very thin, somehow sweet, broth. The combination dishes -- hot udon noodles in broth with meat or fixings, with a side of chicken/beef/etc. "on a bed of rice with special sauce" are better than the equivalent combos at other Japanese places (for example Mishima in Microtokyo.) The sashimi is fine too. But I think the English translation of yabu must be "you're nuts if you don't order noodles" or something like that.