People in Echo Park will tell you about Konbi the way they tell you about a good dentist — reluctantly, and only after you’ve already proven you can be trusted with the information. That’s not quite right anymore, since the place has been written up plenty, but the feeling persists. It still feels like something you found on your own.
Akira Akuto opened Konbi on Bellevue Avenue in 2018 with his partner Nick Montgomery, and the pitch was deceptively simple: a Japanese convenience-store sandwich — the konbini-style onigirazu, the crustless egg salad on milk bread — done with the kind of obsessive precision that makes you wonder what, exactly, was going wrong with your lunch before this. The answer, it turns out, was most things.
The egg salad sandwich is what everyone talks about and what everyone orders and what will ruin you for other egg salad sandwiches permanently. It’s $9. The eggs are soft-boiled to a specific, not-quite-jammy interior. The bread is Japanese milk bread, which is to regular sandwich bread what a good mattress is to sleeping on a futon. The whole thing is a small, cold, perfect object wrapped in paper, and eating it while standing on the sidewalk outside feels correct in a way that sitting down at a table does not.
Akuto is the kind of person who will, if you catch him in the right mood, talk for twenty minutes about bread hydration or the particular ratio of yolk to white that makes the egg salad work. He is not performing passion — he is simply a person who has decided that one thing done well is more interesting than ten things done adequately. The menu reflects that. It’s short. It changes. It is not trying to please everyone, and that restraint is exactly why it pleases so many people.
Beyond the egg salad, there are onigiri on some days, a rotating pastry situation that can involve anything from a black sesame croissant to a tart that looks like it was engineered rather than baked. The coffee is from a small roaster and it’s good. The space itself is small, white, and calm — a counter, a few stools, a glass case. It does not try to be atmospheric. It simply is what it is.
The practical details: Konbi is open Wednesday through Sunday, roughly 8 a.m. until things run out, which on weekends can happen earlier than you’d like. Cash is not preferred; card or tap is easier. Plan to spend $15 to $20 if you get a sandwich, a pastry, and a coffee. There is usually a short line in the morning and you will wait it, because it moves quickly and because you have already decided it’s worth it before you even get there.
It’s on Bellevue just east of Alvarado, which is to say it’s the kind of block that still feels like a neighborhood rather than a destination, even though Konbi has quietly made it one. Go on a weekday if you can. Bring something to read. Eat the egg salad outside. Try not to think too hard about what you’ve been doing with your lunch all these years.
