ama by Brad Kilgore

Itameshi is the frame here: Italian cooking run through Japanese technique, and at ama that shows up first in the pasta. Uni puttanesca agnolotti, a tri-color lasagnette built around wagyu beef cheek, dishes that read Italian on paper and taste of dashi and koji on the plate. The kitchen has also become known for meat aged with koji and grilled over binchotan, including a lamb ribeye finished over pine cones, and for a soft egg crowned with scallop espuma and caviar that has followed the restaurant from its Miami lineage. The room holds eighteen seats, twenty-four counting the bar. Copper wraps the central bar top and throws amber light across a mirrored ceiling, charred cedar covers the walls, and the scale of the place is deliberately small for a restaurant sitting at the foot of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco's Jackson Square. Guests are asked at check-in to keep phones down. A postcard on each table repeats the request, framed less as a rule than as a way of leaving something for whoever comes next to discover. Behind a weighted curtain the footprint opens into ama Social Club, a lounge of mid-century couches, leather booths, an LED oculus overhead and pinball machines from the early seventies. A DJ works the room from Thursday through Saturday and the energy climbs accordingly. Earlier in the week it stays quieter, closer to the mood of the dining room next door. The drinks follow the same dual logic as the food. Japanese spirits meet Italian aperitivo and amaro, producing things like a martini served with kakigori and caviar and yuzu kosho in the olive brine, or a mix of Japanese whiskey with green chartreuse and matcha. None of it feels like a gimmick once you understand the pairing the whole place is built on. Jackson Square has filled out considerably since the pyramid complex was reworked, and ama arrived as the most ambitious piece of that cluster. What distinguishes it from the rest is a willingness to make the room itself part of the proposition: dim, close, analog, and set up so that the table you are sitting at is the only thing competing for your attention.