San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
THE SHOTA’S OMAKASE IS DELICIOUS AND FUN.
Team in the FiDi isn’t afraid to have some fun — or to educate
After just one visit to the Shota, an omakase-only sushi restaurant that opened in the late fall in the Financial District, I knew that it wasn’t like others I’d visited.
“Don’t eat me!” the chef who’d been serving me cried as he held a decapitated bluefin tuna’s head over his face. My dining companion and I had just eaten pieces of temaki made with chopped-up pieces of the fish’s belly, and we were suddenly looking it in the eye.
The strangeness of the experience didn’t stop there: Throughout the 15-course meal ($150), presentations of Edomae-style sushi were accompanied by little quips and demonstrations by the team, clearly meant to distinguish this dinner from the straightforward serving style one would expect when served this type of cuisine. While some of the elements may come off as gimmicky on paper, they ultimately work in real life: Eating at the Shota feels youthful, fresh and marvelous. Most importantly, the fish and its accoutrements are first-class.
Chef-owner Ingi “Shota” Son’s menu is mostly nigiri made with seasonal seafood flown in from Japan, with a climactic confrontation with tuna at its center. After he moved here from Japan three years ago, Son worked at sushi restaurants Morimoto Napa and SoMa’s Omakase, picking up a few tricks and inclinations toward glamour along the way. Like at Omakase, you’re meant to eat the sushi at the Shota by hand, and your server will provide a little wet napkin for you to clean your fingertips with after each piece.
Highlights include butterflied scallop garnished with key lime zest; applewood-smoked katsuo sashimi, to be eaten with pickled crysanthemum flowers, whole-grain mustard and wasabi; and that tuna temaki. The Kyushu nori the chefs use will be better than any nori you have ever eaten in your life, and you will never look at this seaweed ingredient the same way again. The snack-size slices you got at Trader Joe’s will turn to ash in your mouth as you remember the unparalleled taste of the single piece of distilled seaessence you had at the Shota. Sorry about that.
Before dinner enters full swing, diners get to see a wooden “treasure” box of fish and seafood, each specimen prepared and preserved in the old style: wrapped in cherry blossom leaves, fermented in rice or aged in some other way. Then you’re invited to browse a leather roll of gold-plated Cutipol chopsticks, their painted bodies like gourmet Pocky sticks, to choose your wands for the evening.
And the first course is novel yet always the same: a golden sphere with ‘Green Ball’ dianthus flowers tucked inside, made to present an uni pate sandwiched between two wafers. Each one is wrapped in a beautiful patterned cloth. “I’ll loosen the first knot,” the server will tell you. “Please untie the rest.” It feels like you’re at a magic show, and you’re the nervous volunteer from the audience.
There’s one big menu customization option: a $48 Monterey Bay caviar supplement, which appears on three courses. On my visits, I saw just one or two people go for this; a much better idea is to wait until the end of the savory courses, when your server presents you with the a la carte options on a small sheet of paper. They include all of the courses you’ve already had, plus Miyazaki Wagyu beef ($18) and some neat deep cuts: live spot prawns that you can watch being butchered alive and, my favorite, a slim slice of gizzard shad (kohada, $8).
During the tuna phase of the menu, your chef will pull out a plastic model of a bluefin tuna ($7,288 on Amazon!) to show you what you’re eating. While holding a miniature maguro bo cho , or tuna cutter, he’ll demonstrate how butchers prepare the fish, with smooth gestures that parallel the way doctors interact with models of ears and uteruses. If you ask nicely, he might show you photos of himself inside the giant fridge at a shipping center by San Francisco International Airport, butchering the tuna in a winter jacket. Every other week, the chefs get the tuna’s head.
In addition to the rambunctious tone, there are already blunt sensory contrasts here with Omakase, the low-lit and bamboo-decorated SoMa sushi spot where Son and some of his compatriots worked previously. A beaded curtain that gives off slight dorm-room vibes separates the Shota’s entrance from 115 Sansome’s grand lobby, home to a Blue Bottle cafe and the Treasury, a cocktail bar that caters to the happy-hour crowd and local sports supplicants. (That means you don’t have to choose between watching the Big Game and eating sushi; when the home team scores, you’ll know.) The restaurant’s dining room is bright and white like a Chanel boutique and decorated behind the bar by a shelf of donabe pots, which have no immediate relevance to anything on the menu. The soundtrack of couture runway beats, chosen by the general manager, Bay Area native Shar Guillermo, is played at a hushed level.
Within such a pleasant atmosphere, it feels like an imposition to ask questions about sustainability. But alas, I am the critic, so it’s my job to rain on the parade.
“Do you think ... we’ll ever run out of bluefin tuna?” I asked one of the chefs as I bit into a piece of the fatty fish, a pat of oceanic cultured butter. His bright smile faded a bit as he considered the question. Not in my lifetime, he answered. “So who cares, right?” another guest interjected sardonically.
A little dark humor seems inescapable in the face of looming environmental crisis, especially when there are so many problems and so few easy answers. To their credit, the team had a more detailed response when I sent them a follow-up email. They serve “90% sustainable, and 10% wild” tuna, Guillermo wrote.
The sustainable — that is to say, farmed — tuna is from Nagasaki, Kagoshima and Kochi prefectures, raised from eggs. This practice is considered to be less damaging to existing tuna stock than other tuna farming methods, which rely on fattening up juveniles caught in the wild, interrupting their natural life cycles and preventing them from repro
ducing at normal rates. The tuna as the Shota presents it is immensely pleasurable, almost seductively so, which makes thinking about the ethics of the act that much dicier. It’s hard to be good when the thing tastes so damn delicious. And in truth, it’s probably much more useful to aim for harm reduction over moral indefensibility when it comes to food.
You get to have conversations like this because, at the moment, the only seats available are at the chef ’s counter, with a lowered section at the end for wheelchair access. You’ll want to watch the fish sliced, sniff the baskets of vinegared rice and gain a sense of camraderie with your fellow diners — strangers until you realize that it’s OK to talk here. Son and his team have taken the casualness of Omakase and sprinkled it with little moments so new that you can’t help but laugh a little at yourself. “Am I seriously that torn up about which pair of chopsticks to use?” you might think.
That sense of showmanship extends even to the $90 sake pairing, served in a parade of darling little cups designed by Guillermo to flow with the omakase. Guillermo even throws a warmed sake into the mix, prefacing her presentation by tentatively asking if you’re down with it. The final sake echoes the beginning of the meal, when you were asked to choose your chopsticks. Here, you get to pick from a box of glass cups, which ripple with colors like the window display of a head shop. It’s a lot of fun, and the presentation is welcoming even to sake novices.
On the other hand, ordering a carafe of sake is actually much more interesting, since you’ll be able to share a few sips with your chef in a gesture of good will. The mood lifts even more when you do this, and you may get a little extra uni for your trouble.
That’s the thing about this place that I really enjoyed: the ease of intimacy. I was surprised at how consistently and easily the chefs charmed their audience. Partially, yes, it was through the participatory moments that Son and Guillermo constructed — the chopsticks, the handkerchief, the tuna demonstration — but those moments lose their shine quickly on one’s second visit, much like a flight attendant’s safety instruction dance. Those are just pretenses to the real draw of this restaurant, which lies in the way the staff can make the whole counter laugh along with them. This is omakase as theater, and it works.