Most fancy sushi joints aim to make you feel as if you’re in Japan. At Tancho, a 17-seat sushi restaurant in Castro Valley with a $95 omakase, you never forget that you’re in a suburban strip mall, in earshot of a boba chain, a UPS store and a supermarket. The interior is plain, with dentist office-style fish art, a framed moss terrarium and multiple shelves of ceramic cups. The meal doesn’t start with hot towels. The water glasses are jumbo-sized. The menu has a typeface similar to your buddy’s save-the-date invite. The restroom has two notes regarding proper toilet use: a Post-it pleading for manual flushes and a toilet diagram with an arrow pointing to the button. Then you pop a fat scallop nigiri into your mouth, savor its mild sweetness, feel its delicate bounce yield to tenderness, and it all comes into focus.
At a moment when there is no shortage of impossibly priced high end omakase restaurants in the Bay Area, Tancho reminds us that sushi does not need to be obscenely priced or impossibly exclusive to excite.
On a summer visit, a nigiri of hirame (olive flounder) garnished with engawa (fin) demonstrated the bottom-dwelling fish’s contrasting attributes, the lean springiness of its white flesh, the slight crunch of its fin, whose oil-rich qualities were coaxed out by a light torching. An obligatory miso black cod offered its telltale butteriness, but it was skillfully subdued by bits of pickled burdock root, carrot-like in texture, tart and earthy.
Restaurateur Sunny Noah and chef Jason Sen Li opened Tancho in late 2022. The way was paved for it by the Bay Area’s sushi omakase restaurant boom, which kicked off in 2014 according to former Chronicle critic Michael Bauer. (An omakase is a “chef’s choice” sequence of courses centered around sushi, though, these days, the word has become interchangeable with “tasting menu.”) This style of restaurant is overabundant today, especially on the Peninsula, which has become a hotbed for sushi in recent years; more than a half dozen notable omakase spots have opened since 2020. Several of them have ties to Noah, who co-owns Ren Omakase in Menlo Park and Iki Omakase in Palo Alto, and is a consultant at Sushi Kinsen in Redwood City, where Li now serves as chef.
Before opening Tancho, Noah and Li aimed to open a sushi spot on the Peninsula, but after a year of searching to no avail, they got an offer for the Castro Valley location. Noah eventually opened several restaurants on the Peninsula, but the landscape has since changed. “If you [were to] ask me if I would ever open another sushi restaurant or omakase restaurant in the Peninsula, the answer is no,” he said. Compared to a decade ago, Noah, whose background includes stints at Sushi Yoshizumi and the now-closed Sushi Nagai, argues that sushi has become “more competitive than before.”…