Gonpachi wants to be the happiest place on earth

LA's hottest restaurant designer isn't Dodd Mitchell. It's Walt Disney, the man who wasn't content to create an amusement park; he had to build the Happiest Place on Earth.

Similarly, many Los Angeles restaurants aren't content to be "restaurants," based on the consumption of food and wine. They want to be Restaurants, where Customers Consume the Experience.

Disney's spirit has long possessed the La Cienega restaurant corridor that's anchored by The Stinking Rose, which still prides itself on the ability to inject anything with that wacky allium known as garlic (Genuine tagline: "It's cool, it's hip, IT STINKS!").

And now, across the street, there's Gonpachi. Much has been made about how Gonpachi is imported from Japan and it's just like being Tokyo. And technically, that's true. There is a Gonpachi in Tokyo, and it apparently looks quite similar. However, it's a genuine Japanese dining experience much as TGI Friday's is a genuine American dining experience. 

From a Tokyo city guide:

"Though a Disney-like vision, Gonpachi isn’t Main Street, USA.... Global-Dining isolates the archetypal ingredients of a culture and exaggerates them, creating evocative, theatrical spaces where dining is part of the show... The overall design is almost identical to Zest in Ebisu, but with a Japanese not Tex-Mex theme." (emphasis mine)