Matsuhisa Denver

The Restaurant

Matsuhisa Denver occupies a two-story building at 98 Steele Street in Cherry Creek North, the upscale shopping and dining district that runs along the south edge of the Cherry Creek shopping centre. The restaurant is the second U.S. Matsuhisa location after the original Beverly Hills room and a sister to the long-running Matsuhisa Aspen up the road in Pitkin County. The main dining room runs across the ground floor with a long sushi counter at the back, a small chef's-counter seating arrangement that gives diners a direct view of the omakase service, and a generously spaced principal floor of perhaps seventy covers. A private dining room upstairs handles parties of eight to twenty.

The cooking is Chef Nobu Matsuhisa's signature Peruvian-Japanese style — a discipline that Matsuhisa pioneered in Lima in the 1970s before bringing it to Beverly Hills in the late 1980s and watching it become one of the defining global luxury-dining concepts of the late twentieth century. Signature plates run through the standard Matsuhisa canon with serious execution: the yellowtail sashimi with jalapeño that has been on every Matsuhisa menu for thirty years; the new-style salmon sashimi with hot olive oil; the black cod with miso, slow-marinated and broiled, that remains one of the most copied dishes in American luxury dining; the rock-shrimp tempura with creamy spicy sauce; the omakase service from the sushi counter for the customer who wants the chef-driven evening without the menu negotiation. The Peruvian-inflected plates — a yellowtail tiradito, a salmon tartare with caviar — give the menu a sweep the standard high-end-Japanese room in Denver does not offer.

The wine list runs about a hundred and twenty references with a particular focus on sake (one of the more considered sake programmes in the Mountain West, with roughly thirty selections by the bottle), Burgundy whites, German Riesling, and a small but serious Champagne section. The cocktail programme leans toward Japanese spirits — a Toki highball, a Hibiki Old Fashioned, a yuzu-and-shochu seasonal. Service is unhurried, bilingual where required, and operates at the level of polish that the Nobu name signals. Reservations are typically available within two weeks for the main dining room, three weeks for chef's-counter omakase, and a month for the private dining room upstairs.