I apologize for the exclamation in the title of this post, but man oh man were we excited to eat here. I took Erin on a secret Napa getaway for the weekend for our 7th, yes 7th, anniversary and I think this restaurant was the highlight of the trip (sorry, wineries!). I mean, I know we like food, and I know you know we like food, but we especially like sushi and this was like winning the sushi lotto.
We stayed at the Silverado Resort thanks to Living Social. The resort sort of has a country club feel to it, which I think is in part to it being a country club as well. The main building is pretty nice but the actual lodging doesn't look like this.
When we were planning on where to eat for that night, I remembered Morimoto has recently opened a restaurant in Napa. Wondering what our chances were of getting a same night reservation there, we crossed our fingers and tried to get an Open Table through my Yelp iPhone app. 9:30 for two, boom!

We were able to snag a seat at the sushi bar and ordered omakase (chef's choice). We were a little disappointed to find out that the chefs in front of us weren't the ones making each dish for us, which was why we chose to sit at the sushi bar in the first place, but the eight course meal MORE than made up for that. First up, water! Wait wait wait, let me backtrack a second...
We showed up to Morimoto early to see if we could catch any cancellations. Since there weren't any and the bar was pretty packed, we walked over to Downtown Joe's to catch a drink. Yes, A drink. But of course we didn't have just A drink:
Oops! And THEN water was next. I got a little artsy with the camera. :)
The next thing we got were, of course, real drinks. I'm a fan of Hitachino, but I wasn't aware they made a cask ale using sake barrels. Were you?
Our ACTUAL first course, the one with food, was a toro tartare. The presentation was bee-yoo-tee-ful awesome! As I was eating it though, I found myself wishing I could just skip the presentation and have a bowl of it. One big giant bowl of toro tararte all to myself. The condiments on the side that I can remember were wasabi, green onions, sesame, sour cream, guacamole, and I believe a nori puree, but I could be wrong. I'm wrong a lot.
Next up was seared amberjack. I think from here on out I'm going to let the pictures do the talking for me.
After the amberjack, we were served a small bowl of miso paste in a garlic and anchovy oil. The plate was littered with planty things called "vegetables", some pickled and some not. It was sort of a fondue-style dish, where you spear your veggies with a toothpick and dip it. I thought the spearing was very non-Japanese but hey, it's fusion!
Foie gras chawan mushi! Back in the day I used to call Erin chawan mushi because a) I had no idea what it meant, and b) I liked the way it sounded. Well I finally had chawan mushi, which is (like?) an egg custard, and this one topped with seared duck breast with a sweet soy sauce and green onions. That little green dot that looks like a pea is wasabi. I could've used more.
For the intermezzo, we had a cucumber sorbet with a wasabi tapioca. I'm not really a fan of sweets, but this was pretty dang good.
We finally got to the nigiri, which could be the best nigiri I've ever had in my life. I'm one of those people that says "meh" to tuna, but the tuna nigiri was the shiznittle bang snip snap sack. From top right to bottom left we had the amberjack, salmon, hamachi, tuna, and aji (spanish mackerel):
You see all those little garnishes on the nigiri? Well the chef in front of us did that all night. That's all he did. Garnish plate after plate after plate of nigiri. He's the Iron Garnisher!
Next was the peak of the meal, the most entree-ish part of our courses. On a single plate we had a spicy roasted lobster with lemon creme fraiche, seared wagyu beef, and a ten hour pork belly served on rice congee and soy-scallion jus. Rad.
And last but not least (well, maybe last. Again, I'm not a sweets guy and the other food was amazing), we had a super duper beyond moist carrot cake topped with lemon sorbet.
Erin couldn't finish her pork belly, so we ended up getting a giant box in a giant bag to take home our tiny little pork belly block. Whatever, it was amazing for breakfast too. This is me in the aftermath/basking in the afterglow:
Don't try this at home, kids! Actually, if you can cook like this at home, then please try this at home, kids!
-Ryan