[TOASTMASTER] Shigezo is a merry place, the kind of restaurant where toasts spill across aisles. Thickly hewn wooden beams—some as massive as oak trunks—divide the dining room into the sorts of cozy alcoves where the tipsy businessmen in Kurosawa's Ikiru might have forgotten their cares, except with Blazers games on the TV sets above the sushi bar. It is unassuming and inexpensive for the Park Blocks: For $15, you can get a great meal, and for $30, you can wobble out the door not needing to eat again until the next night. Since the restaurant is the first continental U.S. outpost of a Japanese chain, few items on the menu are a departure from the basic fare found in suburban Tokyo noodle shops; nearly everything is an outrageous success. The standout of the daunting appetizer menu (the place is designed for drinking Kirin with nibbles) is the gyoza, three cabbage-and-pork-filled dumplings that present a delectable conundrum: You'll want to keep sampling the thin, pan-fried crust before it has cooled enough to eat without risk of scalding. The okonomiyaki, an egg pancake filled with pork, squid and green onions, combines a lot of strong flavors into a griddle-seared blend, like a teriyaki seafood omelet. The entrees aren't so wide-ranging, and don't need to be. The katsu curry, a standard fast-food order in Japan, is both massively portioned and embarrassingly delicious, the distinctively sweet stew topped with a panko-breaded chicken cutlet and heaped with potatoes and carrots. (There's a vegetarian version as well.) Only one item betters it: the tonkotsu shoyu ramen, with housemade noodles, a pork-marrow and soy broth, and a slice of chashu barbecued pork flank so tender it melts apart at the touch of a plastic soup spoon. The ramen is both homestyle and decadent, like living in a log cabin freshly built from endangered redwoods. The genius of Shigezo is not that it does something new—it's how sublimely skilled it is at resurrecting the old. AARON MESH.