We're way past sushi

Ray Fong -- it's no secret, evidently -- is a pseudonym used by Barry McGee, aka Twist, a seminal San Francisco Bay Area artist who has made the jump from graffiti to fine art and whose work is shown in major museums. The works were small and rare opportunities for tattooed hipsters in search of art, with 12-by-12-inch paintings of McGee's characteristic schlumpy sad-faced figures going for $1,500. The crowds kept pouring in from 6:30 p.m. until about 11. It was a night that may have established Sawtelle as more than just a few blocks of good food, boba shops, and rarefied Japanese groceries and Japanese videos at Video Jun: It is now the site of at least one extremely successful art show.

"This is the biggest show we've ever had," said Eric Nakamura, standing in front of Giant Robot 2 in a black baseball cap and shooting digital photos of the guests. "It's probably the biggest show ever on Sawtelle."

In fact, Giant Robot feels like the future of Sawtelle. A spinoff of Nakamura's 12-year-old hyper-urban magazine Giant Robot, which celebrates Pan-Asian pop culture with a uniquely American attitude located unreliably between worship and irony, Giant Robot stores are now also found in Silver Lake, New York and San Francisco. Nakamura grew up on Sawtelle and still lives five blocks away, and his stores have been a key to drawing in the hip, fashion-forward young iconoclasts who celebrate the area's Japanese roots but are allergic to nostalgia.

"I'm of a younger generation that's still in the area," he says. "I've heard people say, 'Oh, there's no Japanese Americans owning businesses any more on Sawtelle.' It's becoming more Pan-Everybody. And that's cool to me."

Some of the businesspeople who rely on the older Japanese American customers aren't so thrilled by the changes, and are struggling to adapt. Oscar Fay, owner of Mousse Fantasy, a French patisserie that's been open for breakfast and lunch for 18 years in the Sawtelle Place mall, says the kids drop in for pastries, but tastes are changing.

"My food is light and it takes time to make," he says over coffee one weekday morning, with no customers in sight. Though the pastries are French, his other food is Italian-Japanese. "My Japanese customers used to sit around and relax. The kids coming in now are younger and they want everything fast. They also want things heavier, sweeter, saltier."

Maybe they want things more Giant Robot. Even the food.