Eat kampachi sashimi off Mineo Mizuno’s ceramics and watch the planes pop on and off the runway. This crow’s-nest sushi bar, named for a difficult Himalayan airway, sits atop Typhoon at the Santa Monica airport. Ranch dressing on the side? Done! There is a wine-bar aspect to the place (very decent, if obscure, vintages from California), a selection of microbrews, and waitresses who do not, to put it mildly, look as if they are part of the regular hamburger-eating demographic. The “Build Your Own Burger” idea behind the Counter, a fashionable new dive in Ocean Park, makes it a universe of possibilities centering around the hamburger and its matrix of 40-odd fixings. (bar food available one hour before and one hour after dinner). As with a lot of cross-cultural chefs, the fireworks come in his small courses big slabs of animal find him at a loss. Cinch operates, more or less, as a swank lounge that just happens to serve bang bang chicken alongside its mojitos, and chef Chris Behre may occasionally be a little loose with the details of his cooking. The proto-Japanese cooking may be a perfect fit for the vaguely sinister architecture: things like fried oysters wrapped in shiso leaves raw salmon subsumed into spring rolls raw Kobe beef flavored with rosemary, shiso and olives - everything fashionable enough to function as a lifestyle signifier as well as an appetizer or entrée. Like so many of the restaurants designed by Dodd Mitchell, Cinch looks like the archvillain’s lair from a Sean Connery–era James Bond movie, sleek luxury fitted into a nuclear-hardened concrete bunker: dark woods, flickering candlelight, booming music and burnished chinoiserie seemingly concealing a darker, edgier function. Try the excellent bouillabaisse and the rich, soothing cassoulet. Inside, in charming low-ceilinged rooms, fires snap on cold nights and Mimi herself checks in on her customers. Chez Mimi’s is surely the loveliest patio dining spot around, where the vine-entwined gateway alone makes it hard to remember you’re in California and not some gentrified country stable yard in southern France. The wall graphics are loud, the prime-time dinner din deafening, the bar often impenetrably crowded. The Santa Monica flagship restaurant of Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger has become a prime tourist destination, but the regional Mexican cuisine still comes out vivid and strong - fat juicy tacos, refreshing ceviches, spot-on chile verde.