Japanese Restaurant Near Me in Torrance: I-naba's Handmade Soba Lunch

A plate of cold zaru soba with dipping sauce costs $14 at I-naba, 20920 Hawthorne Boulevard in Torrance, and the noodles are made in house. Lunch runs Monday to Friday until a 2:15 pm last order, Saturday until 2 pm, and the restaurant is closed on Sunday. If your japanese restaurant near me search lands in the South Bay at midday, this is a noodle-and-tempura house rather than a sushi showroom.

I-naba sits on Hawthorne Boulevard in north Torrance, ZIP code 90503, and like most of the South Bay you will reach it by car. The menus are printed in Japanese and English side by side, with each dish's Japanese name first and an English description after it, so you can point at either column when you order from your server.

Inside the same address is a separate, much smaller operation, Sushi Inaba, an omakase counter that The Infatuation's 2026 South Bay Japanese guide describes as hidden inside the I-naba restaurant and not for beginners. This article is about the main dining room and its noodle lunch. If you want the counter instead, that is a different booking and a very different evening, so do not walk in at noon expecting chef's-choice nigiri.

Every noodle dish comes as soba or udon, your choice, and the lunch menu splits them into cold and hot. The plain zaru is $14, Ten Zaru with tempura is $24, and Tororo Zaru with grated yam is $18. Oroshi, cold broth poured over noodles topped with grated daikon radish, is $16. Ten Seiro, at $23, is the clever one: cold noodles with a hot dipping sauce and a kakiage tempura fritter of mixed vegetables.

On the hot side, kake in plain broth is $14, kitsune with sweet fried bean curd is $16, and tsukimi with a raw egg is $16. The Hot Nishin at $24, topped with sweet simmered herring, is the dish you rarely see outside Kyoto-leaning shops, and worth ordering once. Add-ons are priced line by line, from +$4 for grated tororo to +$6 to upgrade to a large portion of noodles.

Most tables order a combination rather than a single bowl. The Soba or Udon and Tempura Bowl set is $25; swap the tendon for a kurobuta pork cutlet egg bowl and it is $26. The Battera set, noodles plus marinated mackerel pressed sushi, is $31. Upgrade the noodles themselves to tempura soba and those same sets climb to the $33 to $41 tier, so decide early whether you want tempura on both halves.

For a sit-down lunch with more pieces on the tray, the Bento Lunch Box is $35, with sashimi, tempura, a grilled salmon, a boiled vegetable assortment, salad, rice and miso soup, and $5 more swaps the salmon for grilled black cod. The Deluxe Bento at $47 makes black cod the default. The Sushi Gozen, $38, pairs six pieces of nigiri with tempura and a bowl of homemade soba or udon.

Our honest call: skip the $88 Kaiseki Lunch on a first visit. It is a lovely spread, with salad, an appetizer, sashimi, grilled fish, six pieces of chef's sushi, tempura, a half portion of noodles and ice cream, but the point of I-naba is the noodle, and the $24 Ten Zaru shows it off better. Come back for kaiseki when you are hosting someone who has never eaten Japanese food beyond rolls.

The appetizer page reads like a Japanese home kitchen. Nukaduke, the house rice-bran pickles, cost $7 and are the best signal of care in the room, since nuka beds take daily tending. Tamagoyaki, the layered omelet, and agedashi tofu in broth are $8 each. Gindara Saikyo, black cod in sweet miso, is $30 on its own, and Teba Tatsuta, marinated fried chicken wings, cost $9.

Raw items are marked with a star on the printed menu, as the menu explains in its footnote, which matters if you are ordering for a child or a pregnant guest. Sashimi platters run $45, $60 and $95 by size, but at lunch a sashimi-heavy order misses the reason to drive here. Treat the small plates as a second course with your noodles, not as the main event.

Lunch is the meal to target. On weekdays the kitchen takes last orders at 2:15 pm, on Saturday at 2 pm, and dinner reopens at 5:30 pm on weekdays and 5 pm on Saturday, with last orders at 9 pm and 8:30 pm. The business-hours banner on the homepage lists Sunday as closed, so do not plan a weekend family lunch here on the last day of the week.

There is no online booking system on the website. For two people, arrive before noon on a weekday to have the widest choice of seats and to give yourself time with the long noodle menu. A 1:45 pm arrival still leaves room to order before the 2:15 pm cutoff, but the kitchen will be winding down.

If the dining room is packed and the wait looks longer than twenty minutes, drive south to Old Torrance and try Kagura at 1652 Cabrillo Avenue, a tonkatsu house listed in the same 2026 Infatuation South Bay guide, where the millefeuille pork cutlet is the order. On a Sunday, when I-naba is closed, Kagura is the more reliable plan, since its own site lists Sunday hours from 11:30 am.

Del Amo Fashion Center, at 3525 West Carson Street, is a short drive away and makes the easiest pairing if you are already out for errands in Torrance. If you would rather keep the afternoon Japanese, pair lunch with dinner at Kagura in Old Torrance on another day, or call ahead to ask whether the Sushi Inaba counter has an evening seat for a separate omakase visit.

Address: 20920 Hawthorne Boulevard, Torrance, CA 90503. Lunch: Monday to Friday 11:30 am to a 2:15 pm last order, Saturday 11:30 am to a 2 pm last order. Dinner: Monday to Friday 5:30 pm to a 9 pm last order, Saturday 5 pm to an 8:30 pm last order. Closed Sunday. Cheapest bowl: zaru or kake soba at $14. Pickup and delivery are handled through Grubhub.