From rock ’n’ roll to omakase
Chef finally gets the S.F. restaurant he wants — tiny and with no compromise in ‘the way sushi should be’
Kiyoshi Hayakawa, quietly one of the city’s best sushi chefs, has begun making rice again and braising hamachi collar himself. Between nigiri, he has to dart back to the kitchen to set gourd-shaped cups of chawanmushi in the steamer. At his new venture in Japantown, An Japanese Restaurant, there is no one to do it for him.
Hayakawa once had aspirations of turning Ace Wasabi’s into a multicity chain of rock ’n’ roll sushi restaurants. He managed dozens of cooks and waiters at Koo, his Inner Sunset restaurant, for 11 years. Yet after a quarter century in the Bay Area, Hayakawa’s name remains unfamiliar to most of the chef watchers who could spot Dominique Crenn at 100 paces. That may change with An, which is paradoxically the most discreet project that the Bay Area sushi veteran has done — and the most ambitious.
An has 16 seats and just three employees: Hayakawa; his wife, Ayumi; and longtime collaborator Minoru Cha. It may take first-time visitors 10 minutes to find the front door. And yet, Hayakawa has decided that San Francisco is finally ready for An. “Thirty years ago, this restaurant wouldn’t do well,” he says.
He couldn’t help but notice that sushi chefs in the Bay Area, like their compatriots in Los Angeles and New York, are finally shedding their anonymity and opening jewel-box restaurants like Omakase or Kusakabe, where they offer omakase (chef ’s choice) meals focused on the seasonal and the rare.
In the 1990s, it took loud music and technicolor maki to entice Americans to eat sushi. Ichi Sushi’s Tim Archuleta, who trained under Hayakawa at Tokyo Go-Go, says, “He taught me the traditional way of doing things, but at that time, it was hard to be a really traditional Japanese restaurant.”
“I work for the public,” Hayakawa says of those years.
However, the chef who helped popularize colorful, multi-fish rolls striped with spicy mayonnaise is now restricting himself to traditional nigiri. He’ll make the occasional tekka maki, but only for diners who know that you need to scarf it down fast enough to savor the contrast between the crackly nori and the cool, lean tuna inside.
Earlier this year, hearing that longtime Sushi Ino chef Noboru Inoue was retiring, Hayakawa sold Koo and took over Inoue’s tiny space in Japantown’s Kintetsu mall, repainting the walls a buttery cream color and dimming the lights.
At Koo, Hayakawa and his sushi chefs worked on an elevated platform, the nigiri handed down from on high. Although they’d exchange pleasantries and answer questions, you were always conscious that you were a few feet away from a packed dining room demanding constant slicing, patting and brushing.
At An, the tall, avuncular chef is closer to his customers, in terms of inches, and visibly more at ease. Even when he’s using his metal-tipped chopsticks to position two broiled lobster mushroom slices in a bowl, or balancing a curl of squid on a coral-colored lobe of sea urchin, he passes along dining tips from his last trip to Tokyo or asks customers he’s known since they were children how their parents are doing.
The centerpiece of An’s short menu is its $80 omakase, a series of bites stretched out, like a string of temporal beads, across 90 minutes. After a few salads and cooked dishes, Hiyakawa begins setting out individual nigiri, segueing from the smooth, almost milky plushness of Japanese grouper toward Spanish mackerel, its oily flesh framed by sweetened vinegar and scallions.
Each slice of fish is laid across a shallot-sized nugget of warm rice that has its own presence: not just the texture of the grains, but the flavor as well, which is fuller and
warmer, as if you’d just applied a sepia filter to a black-andwhite photograph.
Much of the fish comes from Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market. But Hiayakawa is no purist — the meal can include a button of quickly blanched baby kale dressed with toasted sesame seeds, or a salad of seared bigeye tuna, avocados and the sweetest, ripest fuyu persimmons that you may taste all winter. A drop of truffle oil may even grace a spoonful of ankimo.
Hayakawa says that, even though he finds himself rushing between kitchen and bar, he is relishing the control the new restaurant gives him. No explaining to a cook that he or she should have added a few more tablespoons of water to the rice or sliced the fish more thinly.
Most of all, no need to make compromises.
“This is the last restaurant, maybe, I’m going to do,” he says. “This is the way sushi should be.”
An Japanese Restaurant, 22 Peace Plaza, Suite 510, S.F. (415) 292-4886. http://sushiansf.com. Open 5:30-10 p.m. Tue.-Thur., until 10:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat.