We celebrated our twelfth wedding anniversary last night with dinner at Ame. It was our first visit and we did it up: we shared a tasting menu, several other dishes, and a flight of wine and sake. That was right as a way to explore the restaurant, but I look forward to going back and just having the hamachi tataki and, especially, the black cod. If you’ve never had marinated black cod, it’s just a sublime dish, and this is a perfect rendition of it: soft and warm and lucious, with no one part overpowering the others. (To think that this is the same fish as the sable we got from the deli when I was growing up; also delicious, but very different.)

The dining experience is a bit of a contrast: the look is fashionable and stark, but the service was casual, friendly, well-informed, and helpful, offering tastes of this and that as we went along. I think some softer edges in the design would have fit the restaurant better. We’ve been to Terra, Ame’s older sibling, a couple of times. Ame’s food is at least as good and doesn’t require a two hour drive. I wonder if the more modern design of Ame was meant as a contrast to the rustic, homey Terra? In any case, we’re definitely going back.