Fine Dining in San Francisco: Sushi at Maruya

San Francisco doesn’t lack for great restaurants, but what I lacked was enough days to eat everything! So after a lot of research (thanks, Tiberiù, Caterina, Cai and Google algorithm developers), I settled on one meal of Japanese oseki fine dining at Maruya, one happy hour and dinner at La Mar (I’d been to and written about the one in Lima and wanted to compare), and a Vietnamese lunch at The Slanted Door.

Here’s how it went at Maruya:

Maruya is an oseki Japanese restaurant, which means a bunch of carefully concocted mouthfuls of flavours, textures and colours, all with beautiful presentations. I’d heard that Maruya was no cheap, but definitely worth it. And it was. We got the $95 Otsukuri omakase, which seemed relatively reasonable and came with an amuse bouche, a kobachi dish, a zensai dish, and otsukuri dish and owan.

I really didn’t know what all of those were, but I had no problem eating them all.

We also got a glass of seasonal sake each from the seasonal menu (there’s a booklet menu of the year-round options too, but I like drinking what’s fresh, especially if it’s nama genshu unpasteurized). We got the first two, the Daiginjo from Yamagata and the Potari Potari nama from Niigata:

There was also a tea menu presented at the beginning, and I figured if we had room, we might get a tea at the end. Though we almost skipped sake altogether in favour of tea. Admittedly, this would have been very unlike me. But I do love gobo (burdock root) and I’d never seen buckwheat tea before:

Then the food. The amuse was a tuna, beet and vinegar snack:

Those little black things were the perfect amount of saline to flavour the tuna, and the vinegar didn’t overpower anything either.

Next, deep-fried squid and onion cake with shiitake and dried fish egg flakes, and a mushroom broth. That’s a mouthful, both literally and figuratively. Actually, it was literally two mouthfuls. Two creamy, warm, soft, crispy, sweet, beautiful mouthfuls. This is where the evening started getting amazing.

Next was this magical box. The server brings it out closed and then opens the two doors in front, as though it were an armoire or lacquered dollhouse. Inside are these tiers with one item on each shelf:

On the top right was a black bean tofu cube – all squishy and savoury and rich. Top left was deep fried fish with pickled carrots. Below that were apple slices marinated in pickled ginger juice (so simple but so delicious, and a great way for the kitchen to use up extra juice from its homemade pickled ginger). And the bottom right tier held 100% buckwheat soba noodles (rare! They’re usually mixed with a little wheat for texture) in a tomato broth.

After that I was so awed that I stopped taking photos. The next dishes were all nigiri, placed one by one in front of each of us. We were at the bar, so we watched the chef make each one with the utmost care, and thanked him as he handed them to us and explained what they were and where they were from: first was tender sea bream, then squid with shiso, prawn paste and a soy paper wrapper. Then chewy and incredibly fresh red snapper (it’s supposed to be chewy) that was more about the texture than the taste. Then marinated mackerel or sea smelt (it didn’t taste fish like it often does at inexpensive sushi restaurants), raw sweet scallop (heaven!), toro taki minced Hokkaido tuna in shiso leaf with pickled Japanese yellow cucumber.

Then heavenly tuna chutoro (the mid-fatty tuna that’s my favourite and melts like butter in your mouth), uni from Hokkaido (it was sweeter and juicier than Quebec uni and the pre-frozen uni I’ve had), geoduck mantle that snaps in your mouth, Tasmanian salmon (the chef says they change the salmon they use and where it comes from depending on what’s the best quality. So today it was Tasmanian).

Finally, miso soup with amberjack and lemon rind slivers to settle the stomach, because did we really eat all that???

And just when we thought we were done: sparkling yuzu lemonade, for the lightest ending in true fine dining Japanese style.

All I can say is wow. And, go.

Maruya
2931 16th St. 
San Francisco, CA
415-503-0702