How Sushi Note in Beverly Hills is redefining wine pairings for your next omakase.

Why is it so difficult to combine sushi with wine?

At most sushi bars, the focus of drinking is sake, and while great wine is not uncommon in a sushi setting, it is often only offered in bottles from traditionally revered appellations such as Champagne, Burgundy and Napa. In recent years, sushi bars have become venues for great wine enjoyment, with an increasing emphasis on wine pairings.

But at Sushi Note's new Beverly Hills location, in the Rodeo Collection parking garage beneath Givenchy and Bulgari boutiques (and at least two plastic surgery offices), the restaurant is pushing the envelope on omakase sushi drink pairings. Here, the focus is not on sake, whiskey, cocktails, or traditional ideas about what wines go with sushi, but on a kaleidoscopic flood of unknown and appreciated wines.

“Every fish is so uniquely different,” says Dave Gibbs, co-founder of Sushi Note, who runs the restaurant in partnership with Andy Paxson and sushi chef Kiminobu Saito. “We believe there is a perfect wine to pair with every wine, but that takes effort and time.”

The difficulties associated with mating can be traced to three factors: very different fish, from mild, buttery albacore tuna to salty, oily mackerel; the vinegar in sushi rice; and strong spices such as wasabi and pickled ginger.

At Sushi Note, the process of creating wine pairings involves tasting, tweaking and taking risks with various wines from around the world, incorporating the work of a team of sommeliers at two Sushi Note locations, including the original in Sherman Oaks. A more ambitious omakase at Beverly Hills Sushi Note called for a more ambitious wine pairing, and that's what you'll find here.

“Every night there are things that we honestly shouldn't be pouring at all,” says Gibbs. “There's always a special wine that no smart business person would normally pour by the glass. It's a direct loss. “I'm losing money on that bottle, but it's worth it to improve the overall experience.”

It's the details that make this place stand out: Led by beverage director Ian Lokey, a team of more than a dozen wine experts create a unique wine pairing series each week, featuring rare labels of classic wines — including Champagne and Burgundy — as well as lesser-known bottles from around the world.

“We employ more somms than servers,” says Lokey, whose wine list includes more than 350 labels. Lokey and his team taste and compare wines and fish every week, working directly with culinary director Earl Aguilar and chef Saito, tasting their way through various possible combinations before arriving at a pairing that fits exactly the fusion of fish, rice and the conditions of each piece. Sushi. Sake, the traditional fermented rice drink that could be more popular in America as Japan for drinking with sushi, is served sparingly and often as a counterpoint.

At Sushi Note, you could opt for sake alone—the restaurant's bottle list gives you that option. But skipping the wine pairing here might be like dousing your chutoro with soy sauce from a small plastic bag.

Serving wine with sushi is no easy feat. Restaurants like two-Michelin-starred kaiseki spot Hayato in the Arts District will accommodate diners' wine requests with smart pairings for their sushi courses. And mini-chain Ootoro in Little Tokyo, Walnut and Irvine bills itself as a sushi and wine bar. A little further afield, Sushi Bar ATX in Austin and Soseki in Winter Park, Fla., have made wine service a focus. But Sushi Note's commitment to pairing its omakase piece by piece with rotating wine pairings throughout the evening is helping the company stand out in Los Angeles' increasingly crowded market for premium sushi and building a national reputation for its brand. A third restaurant in Las Vegas is currently in development.

The right wine for the right fish

On any given evening, Sushi Note's team of sommeliers will pour a dozen different wines by the glass as part of an Omakase experience. This represents hundreds of hours of collaborative work by a team of sommeliers, including Briana O'Connor, Sean Muramatsu, Jonathan Sanchez and Omar Lima, to find just the right wine to pair with a particular piece of fish.

“The oil content, the side dish, the ratio of fish to rice… all of these play a role in finding the right combination,” says Lokey.

Add to that the push-and-pull balance between fish and rice, where the wrong wine can easily clash.

“Some of our guests still have trouble with the idea of ​​drinking wine with sushi,” says sommelier Omar Lima, “and especially red wine.”

That old orthodoxy—no red wine with fish—is confronted head-on by Sushi Note, whose wine team relishes the complexity found in, say, the lighter reds of the Loire Valley or high-altitude Pinot Noir. Not much Cabernet is poured at Note, but bright, bold reds can be a revelation: A natural red Cabernet Franc from Saumur sings with Chutoro, while a Burgundy wine from the village of Irancy—where up to 10% of the Cesar grape is allowed alongside Pinot Noir—cuts and subtly complements a bright piece of Yellowtail flown in direct from Japan.

In practice, the experience of dining at Sushi Note in Beverly Hills is a blur — “an arsenal of bottles,” says Omar Lima — with degrees of difficulty in the wine service that rewards knowledge and interest. A 2008 Jacques Chopin Champagne with toasted brioche notes from longer aging is paired with Hokkaido uni and shiro ebi nigiri, offering layers of flavor: creamy, salty flavors from the uni and a distinct sweetness from the shrimp, all rounded by an underlying sweet-and-sour texture-flavor interplay between expertly leavened rice and toasted, bready vintage Champagne.

Japanese king mackerel (saba) is served with an unusual Pinot Blanc from Alsatian producer Marc Kreydenweiss, a relatively unknown and rule-breaking winemaker working with an obscure grape, paired with a fish that few Americans would call their favorite sushi dish, with over-the-top results. The light texture and understated flavor of the mackerel is shot through like lightning by the Pinot Blanc, somehow mirroring the slightly fatty, lip-smacking quality of the fish itself.

A dizzying sequence of pairings allows the concept to gain a kind of thermal mass over the course of an omakase session. First, a glass of aligoté—the forgotten white Burgundy grape that's currently all the rage among wine lovers—along with finely cured red snapper.

Then one of Chef Saito's favorite combinations: Japanese wild-caught Medai with a hint of yuzu, paired with Chablis, the flint-rimmed, unoaked Chardonnay from the northernmost reaches of Burgundy. This is followed by Japanese bluefin otoro – the fattiest cut – served with a glass of Galician red, which comes from a corner of Spain far better known for the iconic white wine Albariño, but here offers a “sanguine, bloody” quality (in Lokey's words) that sliced ​​through the tuna as deftly as any Yanagiba knife.

Finally, a yuzu sushi rice vinegar gelato alongside Domaine Castéra “Caubeigt” Jurançon, a unique sweet white wine that comes from the far southwest of France, on the border with Spain. These wines are meant for dessert, but with an electrifying burst of acidity that makes them unusually tempting. The combination of these melts with the gelato to create a kind of fragrant jam, sweet and bitter and endlessly long. “It's the nectar of the gods,” says Lima, laughing.

Big in Japan?

Ask the Sushi Note team members and they'll tell you they're completely off the hook here—omakase wine pairing in this style is virtually unheard of in Tokyo or anywhere else in the United States. To double-check, I called a caller: Eric Asimov, longtime New York Times wine writer and author of “Wine With Food,” a book about the art of food and wine pairing.

“I've never experienced an omakase sushi bar with wine pairing,” Asimov tells me. A precise pairing at this level requires attention to every detail: the fish, yes, but also the conditions, the vinegar content in the rice (Chef Saito's vinegar content is gently balanced, and perhaps the grains of his California-sourced rice are a bit larger than at other restaurants), alongside the impact of additional ingredients, the use of blowtorches to define texture, and countless other influences that affect the impact of the wine, “all of which could alter what might be considered a perfect pairing.”

Sushi Note may be one of the few places dedicated to the art of precise omakase wine pairing, but perhaps not for long.

Chef Saito tells me that in Tokyo, chefs are beginning to grasp the idea of ​​pairing sushi and wine, and that something like this may not remain exclusive to Los Angeles for long. “Much more [sushi] “Chefs have experimented with wine,” says Saito. “I can imagine a restaurant like ours doing very well in Japan!”