Mystery chef works sushi magic at Saison
What is craftsmanship? How does a chef truly showcase a single ingredient?
By what measure should one define value? And — who is this guy? These are the kind of questions that might come to mind while watching Jiro Lin expertly slice through a fillet of Japanese barracuda during his guest chef stint at Saison, Joshua Skenes’ four-star restaurant.
For five nights a week, Lin, stoically positioned behind an eight-seat counter in the Townsend Street restaurant, quietly serves some of the best sushi in San Francisco. And at a starting point of $289 per person ($225 menu, plus tax and tip), it is also among the city’s most expensive meals, period.
Curiously, Lin is a relative unknown. Google him, and nothing comes up. In this day and age of the food-crazed Internet, great chefs do not just appear, let alone charge this much. They are first crowned as rising stars or weaned in Michelin-starred restaurants. Yet here we are, sitting at a wood counter eagerly awaiting the next pristine pieces of fish from a mystery man.
Born in Burma, educated in Singapore and trained in Japan, Lin has been perfecting his craft for nearly 25 years. He came to the United States in 2002 after a decade of cooking in Japan, and found a job at Hamano Sushi in Noe Valley, the kind of sushi joint scattered throughout the Bay Area, serving up perfectly fine renditions of edamame, tempura and rainbow rolls.
But between tossing tempura in the fryer, Lin got to showcase his skills through his omakase menu, earning a loyal following of customers who felt they had found the diamond in the rough.
One of those was Skenes, who caught Lin’s eye when he ordered omakase menus on consecutive days. The Saison chef soon began frequenting Lin’s nook on every Sunday night, rain or shine.
The more they got to know each other, the more they realized they both appreciated the same things: simplicity, quality, ingredients.
“My first priority is quality and doing the right thing,” says Lin. “There are some things you cannot do without sense and skill.
“When you touch a fish, you sense it. You sense how you’re supposed to cut the fish, and how you’re supposed to present the fish.”
Skenes, whose love of Asian culture is well documented, began to sense that Lin was itching for his own restaurant.
“He had been there for 11 years,” Skenes points out. “Can you imagine coming from a place, especially Tokyo, that’s so focused and organized and detail-oriented and super-devoted — and then having to serve spicy California rolls?
“I felt like he needed the right format, and he would take off.”
For two years, the pair flirted with the idea of a new restaurant to showcase Lin. They even found a few potential