International super-restaurant Zuma
chose San Diego and the Guild Hotel
for its first California location, and food
critic Troy Johnson kicks tires on the
big, elaborate show
Professionals aren’t really allowed to take photos in Zuma, I’m told. Maybe the global super-restaurant has been burned in the past. Maybe they let some fresh photographer follow their eye around Zuma Dubai only to realize the photog was a Meow Wolf disciple, turning Zuma’s sushi rolls into radioactive colors appreciable only on a hospitalized amount of recreational drugs.
Zuma’s team did offer “provided images” for this review, but provided photos are the suburban condo of photography—too planned, so weirdly perfect and uniform that each dish looks like something Jim Carrey might chew with an anesthetized-dad smile in The Truman Show.
If there’s a way to suck the joy out of anything, it’s being too perfect at anything. Plus, it’s way more fun to ask Lili, our content coordinator, to sketch the dishes. Her creative brief was “Vonnegut doodles.”
To be clear, I immensely respect and support Zuma’s stance. We’re all just trying to survive the name-and-likeness apocalypse. We use cute emojis to cover our kids’ faces on social media, only to have AI laugh and perfectly fill in the face, making our baby look like a better looking version of our baby.
Every unique thing we manage to conjure is just source code for unkempt internet hijinks.
This is true in restaurants, especially. Now dependent on social media for cost-effective marketing, they turn their stories over to the creator realm, which is a thrilling crapshoot. You could get a heartfelt, hilarious 90 seconds of internet gold, or you could have your Michelin-trained dream boiled down to: “Super yummy secret spot with IYKYK soosh.”
So, in this world where we are constantly remixed against our will, taking extreme steps to control our expression of self feels like a noble act.
(The irony in Zuma’s case, of course, is that professionals aren’t welcome—but any diner can take a low-lit photo that makes sushi look like a distressed resident of a reptile enclosure and post it on social media.)
Stepping into Zuma’s brand-new outpost in The Guild Hotelin Downtown, you realize how much its control instinct fits. Everything in here feels calibrated for immaculate vibes—a Japanese izakaya-inspired movie set dedicated to food, drink, and apex human bone structure. A world-class sound system plays a liquid thump, imbuing omakases with a low-toned sex appeal. The late-afternoon light in the large, hidden courtyard is afterlife-ishly soft, as if NASA placed a fabric diffuser over the sun to herald Zuma’s arrival. Bamboo sushi mats are even placed over the unsexy parts of the POS systems. The details are many and well done.
Zuma draws an impossibly good-looking and well-oiled crowd: No fewer than 6,000 skincare routine steps assembled for dinner. It’s not obnoxious, unless you consider pretty people who care about their appearance a personal affront. As a natural sloven, I once did, but have since undarkened. Multiple people engage in selfie routines so elaborate they qualify as modern dance.
But the rest of the packed crowd is here because Zuma has pulled off a rare feat—starting with one restaurant in Knightsbridge, London, and spinning nearly three dozen locations across the globe while somehow maintaining a fairly great name in the food world. Opened in August, San Diego is its sixth location in the US—the first in California.
I meet a down-to-earth local couple at the sushi counter who simply love restaurants, as well as a businessman who is about to become very famous for bringing the first 360-degree, AI-enabled colonoscopy camera pill to market. If you magically turn colonoscopies into a multivitamin, you can afford to eat at Zuma.
Zuma has succeeded because the head of culinary is formidable, as is the money behind it. Co-founder/chef Rainer Becker trained in two of Germany’s most historically serious restaurants—Munich’s famed Michelin, Koenigshof (now gone), and Goethehaus in Bensberg. Then he spent 14 years leading kitchens for Hyatt’s top global properties—including six at Park Hyatt Tokyo, where he fell hard for Japan’s famed izakayas. Izakaya culture’s smoky-wet charms are nearly impossible to resist: pub snacks and skewers (yakitori), all meant to be shared unpretentiously over a Japanese businessman–amount of drinks.
Becker found a sturdy investor in Arjun Waney, and the duo opened their first Zuma in 2002. The concept showcases three distinct Japanese traditions—izakaya, sushi, and robata (grilled meats and things over binchotan, Japan’s famous clean-burning charcoal)—all executed with the Western urge of flavormaxxing.
All told, their restaurant group has slayed the game on a global scale.
The humbler izakaya inspirations are why Zuma San Diego, while definitely high-end, has no white tablecloths or trad stuffery. The wooden colonnade tunnel entrance is more an ode to geometry than Instagram. The inside is designed like a giant bento box containing ancient ruins—intentionally rough masonry and stone, all uplit in the most dramatic ways (Zuma’s lighting specialist deserves medals). The biggest statement pieces are the towering ornate flowers. And the energy is high—the club-drug comedown music, the glassed-in robata cooks smoking their towers of meats in the center of the dining room, a just-enjoy-yourself bonhomie.
Nearly every dish is loaded with the what’s-what of flavor steroids—truffle, lobster, Wagyu, compound mayos, miso everywhere, yuzu-kosho, butter, ponzu, caviar, toro, uni, chiles—often multiple on the same dish. The menu boasts ponzu, truffle ponzu, chili ponzu, shiso-ponzu butter, sweet soy, smoked-chili soy, soy butter, and wafu sauce.
For example: the chu-toro with Oscietra caviar, black truffle, and a miso bun. That’s like building a super-car using a Ferrari engine, Porsche chassis, the long Jaguar hood, and the cool factor of an El Camino.
I’m not mad at it, for this reason. Their base-model nigiri is excellent—perfect vinegar-sweet rice warmed just so, with apex fish served near room-temp (sushi isn’t Coors Light, shouldn’t be served mountain-blue cold); and a table shoyu that’s deliciously complex, nearly a ponzu—likely made with a mixture of top-notch soy, mirin, citrus, and kombu or tobiko, etc.
The entree calling-card is cod with miso, which is now the classic rock song of Japanese food. Incredibly fatty and buttery sablefish is turned high-end through technique and time: marinated three days in the magic of fermented beans, sake, mirin, and often a touch of sugar. Zuma’s is delicious, lacquered in umami—though in a few parts the marinade loitered and took it to the edge of too-sweet.
Everything from the sushi case was about as good as it gets—the thin-sliced sea bass with yuzu, truffle, and salmon roe; torched salmon belly tomato relish; the o-toro. From the robata enclosure, Kurobuta pork belly is used for skewers with a side of yuzu miso mustard. It’s spartan, simple izakaya food, the exterior of the pork crisped enough so that biting it reveals the rendered belly fat. Though a tad revolting, the charm of pork belly fat is that it’s a sort of warm meat gelato. The fat bastes the rest of the meat, keeping it moist as the exterior goes through seven layers of Maillard reactions. The best bite of any meat is the one a surgeon general frowns at.
The star dish—and the most emblematic of Zuma’s spiritual quest to add delicious fuss to the icons of unfussy food—just might be the roasted potato. It’s served crisped and whole, mixed tableside with shiso-ponzu butter, sansho-lime salt, and lime. It is possibly the best loaded baked potato you’ve ever eaten, ranking near Robuchon’s pommes puree and McDonald’s 1970s fries (’70s exclusively).
At the end of the night—though still needing repeat visits to go through the whole menu—I admit to being surprised, if not shocked, at how good Zuma is. Quality usually falters at or around “global expansion.”
Does it adhere to traditional ideas? Not in the slightest. But if a German chef with hard-earned chops would like to take the ascetic restraint of sushi and treat it like nachos—layering it with all sorts of flavor confetti and textures—god bless him. As long as your base model is excellent. And Zuma’s is.
Becker’s dream is radically different than Jiro’s, and I’m glad both exist. Downtown San Diego could use more dreams right about now.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
