A year after moving from Tokyo to San Francisco, my husband and I craved good Japanese food so much that we ditched our families for Thanksgiving and flew to Japan for three nights of eating.
San Francisco isn't exactly a culinary wasteland. It has great wine, an abundance of fresh produce and many good restaurants. But in Tokyo, restaurants create beautiful dishes that are assembled to play up the natural flavor of seasonal ingredients like bamboo shoots in the spring and pike eel in the summer. After months of fruitlessly seeking a San Francisco restaurant that would give us a taste of that experience, we decided we had no choice but to travel.
Hey, now! I know Tokyo chef's have insurmountable advantages - access to fresher ingredients being the most obvious - but that doesn't mean you can't find good Japanese food in the Bay Area:
1. Ky0-ya: in SF's Palace Hotel. very exquisite sushi
2. Kappou Gomi: in SF's Richmond District and just a few blocks from Free Will HQ. This is Kappou dining, not sushi - so a lot of dishes will be exotic and unfamiliar to most Americans. You're probably better off coming with a Japanese person. Left to my own devises, I seem to end up ordering "fish head dunked in amber" while my wife orders food that I end up stealing.
3. Sushi-ran: in Sausalito. the freshest sushi in the Bay Area, some of which comes straight from Tsukiji Fish Market
4. Main Street Sushi: in Half Moon Bay. clever American-style sushi.
5. Nijiya Market: the best place in SF to buy Japanese snacks, sauces, ingredients, etc.
Also, Ozumo in financial district does good work on sushi and appetizers. Naked sushi in Marina makes a good beef Tataki.
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