Ame

Our verdict

The cooking was built around a seasonal New American framework filtered through Hiro Sone's Japanese sensibility, drawing additional reference points from southern France and northern Italy. That combination produced a menu where sashimi, crudo, and tartare sat alongside preparations like broiled sake-marinated Alaskan black cod with shrimp dumplings in shiso broth, dishes that used local California ingredients as the base material and Japanese technique as the organising logic. Sone and his partner Lissa Doumani described the approach as "personal cuisine," a framing that held up against the cooking's evident specificity. The St. Regis address gave Ame the physical infrastructure of hotel dining, polished service, a controlled atmosphere, without the anonymous quality that often accompanies it. The room read sophisticated rather than corporate, and the kitchen's dual fluency in Japanese and European traditions gave the menu a coherence that purely fusion-labelled restaurants of the same era rarely managed. Ame has since closed, but its five-year Michelin run and its particular synthesis of Japanese-Californian cooking left a clear mark on how San Francisco's fine-dining scene understood that category during the late 2000s and early 2010s.