Craig Stoll, Chris Cosentino, and Nate Appleman are the chefs and co-owners of three of San Francisco’s most respected Italian restaurants (Delfina, Incanto, and A16, respectively). None of these three men were born in Italy or even visited the country until they were adults, but no one questions their authority when it comes to making spaghetti carbonara. Laurence Jossel, the chef and co-owner of Nopa, isn’t Mexican, but that won’t stop him from serving refried beans with pickled nopales at his new restaurant, Nopalito, opening later this month. And even though Michael Mina was born in Cairo, no one goes to the restaurant that bears his name expecting a meal of shawarma and pita bread. But when diners walk into Sebo and see Michael Black and Daniel Dunham standing behind the counter, they often have the same reaction Traci Des Jardins did the first time she visited the Hayes Valley sushi bar. “There’s no way this is going to be good,” she thought. “White boys can’t make sushi.”

Des Jardins, whose restaurants—the elegant California-French Jardinière, the new-American steakhouse Acme Chophouse, and the taqueria Mijita—draw from her own French Acadian–Mexican background, calls herself a “sushi snob” and won’t eat at most sushi bars in San Francisco. “I eat sushi in New York or L.A., but not here,” she says. Nothing about the chefs at Sebo, who bear little resemblance to the scolding types who command the kind of sushi places Des Jardins frequents, conformed to her notion of what a sushi chef should look like.

Des Jardins can be forgiven for not noticing that Black is half-Japanese. (He lived in Okinawa for the first six years of his life.) In the same way that Tiger Woods is part Chinese, you wouldn’t know it by looking at him. Dunham, however, is just what he appears to be: a cook from New Jersey, with tattoo sleeves and a spiky mop of hair, who has never seen the Pacific from the other side. But despite their looks, these two men rank among the most respected sushi chefs in this country. A recent Details article on the best sushi bars in America—a roster that includes the legendary Mori Sushi in Los Angeles and the revered Sushi Yasuda in Manhattan—lists just one Bay Area restaurant: Sebo. It’s an honor Dunham likens to being a shrink who opens a magazine and finds his name mentioned alongside Freud’s.

In Japan, a sushi chef’s apprenticeship can last as long as a decade. A wannabe itamae spends years sweeping floors and washing pots before being allowed to even make the rice, much less get near the fish. It’s a course that contributes to the sushi mystique, the notion that cutting fish and propping it on top of a mound of rice is a skill forbidden to all but a chosen few, passed along through rites as arcane and unknowable as a Freemason’s initiation. But in the three years since they opened Sebo, Black and Dunham have cut through that myth as if it were a slab of high-grade toro. The secret to mastering sushi, it seems, is not much different from the one Nate Appleman relied on to master his famous meatballs—that age-old, never-fail recipe of equal parts passion and sweat.

Japan occupies a special realm in the food world, and appreciation of its cuisine is a sign of serious cred. But it’s taken me years to get onboard. Blame it on too much mediocre sushi: thick slabs of bland tuna on gummy knobs of rice, Godzilla rolls, and seaweed salad—I sometimes ate them, but I never craved them. When I did venture into serious sushi restaurants, I had some fantastic meals, but I bumped up against a culture that didn’t return my interest. It wasn’t just the fact that we sometimes spoke a different language. At French and Italian restaurants, servers flirt with me and top off my wine. Waiters at the dim sum houses I frequent are sometimes indifferent to my presence, but they never make me feel unworthy of my shu mai. Even the women who pat out the tortillas at the taquerias in Oakland’s Fruitvale district always manage a smile. But at hardcore Japanese restaurants, I rarely feel the love.

Few cuisines are as bound by custom and etiquette as sushi. Plug the word into any search engine, and you’ll come upon dozens of sites listing rules for eating it: Don’t rub your chopsticks together; dip the fish, not the rice, into the soy sauce; put the nigiri into your mouth fish side down and eat it in a single bite. It doesn’t help that chefs at some of the more traditional sushi bars often take a defensive stance against their customers. Tetsuo Kashiyama, the chef at cult favorite Hama-Ko in Cole Valley, keeps a close watch on the soy sauce bowls set along his counter. Customers who overfill them or dare to ask, “What’s fresh?” do so at their own risk. At Tekka, a sushi restaurant in the Inner Richmond, a sign in the window warns: “No Forks, No Sodas, No Complaining” and (my favorite) “Come Back After 9:30.” There are plenty of people who relish the intimidation and enjoy the challenge of mastering a purposefully opaque food culture. Me? I’d rather order a pizza.

But Sebo turned me into a believer. Instead of the usual lineup of salmon, yellowtail, and overly sweet unagi, the chefs offer rare Japanese varieties like saury pike, banded-blue sprat, and gizzard shad. Instead of scary cream cheese–and–fake crab combos, I can eat umekyu, a hand roll of crisp nori folded delicately around tender rice with cucumber and an oddly delicious pickled plum. One night, Dunham set a clear glass bowl lined with slices of raw scallop and sprinkled with green onion and edamame in front of me, then poured in a mushroom broth steeped in a French-press coffee pot. The scales fell from my eyes as the flavors unrolled on my tongue, and I realized what I’d been missing. But it wasn’t just the food. At last I was able to appreciate sushi without worrying that I might offend the chef by violating some esoteric rule of etiquette that I didn’t know existed. I could inquire about a particular fish and get an answer other than “very special.” I didn’t have to prove I was worthy of the good stuff; I just had to ask.

I’m not the only one drawn to Sebo—the restaurant has become a sort of industry clubhouse. Stuart Brioza, the executive chef at Rubicon before it closed last August, and his wife, pastry chef Nicole Krasinski, live directly behind the restaurant and are its unofficial ambassadors. “For the first year, it seemed that every third customer who came in here said, ‘Stuart sent me,’” recalls Black. Charles Phan, of the Slanted Door, is a regular here, as is COCO500’s Loretta Keller. Amaryll Schwertner and Lori Regis, from Boul­ettes Larder, also come in often, and Ravi Kapur, the chef de cuisine at Boulevard, sometimes brings his crew to Sebo after their shift. When they arrive, they may find Des Jardins, who now eats here several times a month, finishing up a meal while Cosentino orders another round of sake.

Unlike the chefs who sit at their bar, Black and Dunham aren’t well known. Their peers boast résumés listing stints in top kitchens in Europe and time spent working on the line with this country’s own celebrity cooks. Black and Dunham are outsiders and are largely self-taught when it comes to sushi. While their friends’ names are on every food writer’s speed dial, Dunham and Black are rarely quoted in the press. Their restaurant opened in March 2006, but its website went live just last November and doesn’t list a phone number. Those who try to track Sebo down using the number on CitySearch won’t have much luck. (“It’s wrong,” says Dunham. “We’ve tried to get them to change it.”) Reporters have been reduced to slipping notes under the restaurant’s door in order to get an interview. In an age when many chefs consider self-promotion as essential a skill as knowing how to cut a proper julienne, Black and Dunham seem content with no greater affirmation of their talent than a heartfelt thank-you from a happy customer.

Even Japanese chefs are taking notice of Sebo. Masaki Sasaki—who worked at Kantaro, a highly regarded sushi bar with a largely Japanese clientele that closed in 2003, and now works at the St. Regis—says that the owners of many of the city’s sushi bars watch Black and Dunham very closely. “They envy what they’re doing there,” he says. “When I think of most sushi bars here, I think of sushi written in English, but when I think of Sebo, I think of sushi written in Japanese characters.”

There are no prep cooks at Sebo, no pantry assistants or interns. Two chefs constitute the entire kitchen staff for the evening, save for a dishwasher who doesn’t arrive until shortly before the restaurant opens. You get the sense that Dunham and Black don’t get out much. Try to engage them in conversation about one of the cult sushi bars on the Peninsula, and they shrug their shoulders. “I heard of that place,” says Dunham, “but I’ve never been.” When Black mentions seeing his name in Details alongside that of his idol, Morihiro Onodera, he says, “I know everything about that guy; he’s a legend,” but admits he’s never made the trip to Onodera’s restaurant.

Last year, after adding a sixth night to their weekly schedule (a no-sushi izakaya menu of traditional sake-pub food on Sundays), Dunham and Black hired Fukashi Adachi to help out. Black says that Japanese customers coming to the restaurant for the first time often gravitate to Adachi’s end of the bar, assuming that because he’s Japanese, he must be the superior chef. Adachi—who grew up in Shizuoka, Japan, where he worked in restaurants as a teenager, writing the menu on the whiteboard and clearing tables—didn’t learn to make sushi until he took a job at a now closed Berkeley restaurant. “It was terrible,” he says. From there, he went to work at Blowfish Sushi to Die For and Deep Sushi, both in San Francisco, but Sebo, Adachi says, is the “most Japanese” restaurant he’s worked at in terms of its menu and approach to food. Still, he adds, the overall experience at Sebo is “not Japanese”—the main difference being that “Michael and Daniel are nice.”

Black is, in fact, very nice, but no one would call him easygoing. Lean and wiry, with a haircut like a Army recruit’s and long, muscular fingers that recall his early musical training, he looks around nervously when he talks, and tugs at the ends of his sleeves. His intensity seems to find its focus when he’s standing behind the counter with a knife in hand and a fish laid out in front of him. “My personality doesn’t lend itself to noodling around,” he says.

Though he may not fit the stereotype of a sushi chef, Black can claim raw fish as his birthright. His Japanese mother has run a sushi bar in the Salinas Valley for more than 20 years: Shogun, which serves an Americanized Japanese menu of California rolls and bento boxes with grilled shrimp, has won the local paper’s Best Japanese Restaurant title eight years running. But even though restaurants are his family’s business, Black grew up wanting to be a musician. He started piano lessons at age three and eventually carved out a career playing with various ensembles and writing and performing at the Los Angeles Theater Center.

After he left his parents’ house, Black found that he craved his mom’s food, so he taught him­self to cook the homestyle dishes he grew up eating. In 1993, he came to the Bay Area with thoughts of continuing his studies at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and struck up a friendship with Larry Tse, who owns the House, a pan-Asian restaurant that was on Ninth Avenue at the time but has since relocated to North Beach. “I ate there for about a year before I asked for a job,” says Black, who took to the task with characteristic focus. “Michael is unrelenting in his philosophy,” says Tse. “That’s just his personality. He’s very serious about how he believes sushi should be eaten, and very good at connecting with customers and educating them about the experience.”

From the House, Black went to help his friend James Chu open So, in the Outer Sunset. He drew up the floor plan (Black briefly studied design at Long Beach State) and helped develop
a menu of Japanese specialties and handmade Chinese noodle dishes. After about a year there, Black was ready to get out of the restaurant business for good—until he got a call from Gerald Dumuk, asking if he’d help out at Midori Mushi, a sushi bar that operated out of the Days Inn in Hayes Valley.

At the time, Midori Mushi had a reputation for serving things like eel and avocado rolls covered with crushed barbecue potato chips, as well as something called the Martha Stewart roll. The list of house rules included “Don’t ask us to turn down the music” and “No khakis.” When Black arrived to bring a more serious focus to the menu, Dunham was working there, and the two struck up a friendship. But Dumuk showed more flair for copywriting—the staff wore T-shirts that read “Your Fish Smells Like Pussy”—than for management, and the restaurant closed in 2003.

Dunham followed a more traditional path to the kitchen. His fascination with fish began during childhood summers spent at the Jersey Shore. “I’d find a crab shell on the beach and have to pick it up and smell it,” he recalls. Those walks on the beach led to a job at New York’s Fulton Fish Market, then to culinary school: first at Johnson & Wales, in Rhode Island, and then to Cornell, where he graduated from the university’s hotel-management program.

“This is the book that changed my life,” says Dunham, passing a thick volume over the bar. Food Fantasy of the Hotel de Mikuni was written by Kiyomi Mikuni, a Japanese chef famous for adapting French food to Japanese tastes. “A professor of mine at Johnson & Wales passed it around in class,” Dunham remembers. “It made me fall in love with Japanese food. I had never seen anything like it.” Published in 1986, the book is a paean to late-1980s nouvelle cuisine—eroticized close-ups of peppers and huge white plates painted with bright purées and topped with a single quenelle of some type of mousse. Dunham knows it’s dated, but like a die-hard fan who can’t get rid of his Genesis albums, he still sees the beauty in it. “That’s the dish that got me,” he says, pointing to an oval of tuna topped with a raw quail egg, so the whole thing looks like a hard-cooked egg cut in half. “I must have made it a hundred times.”

After he graduated from culinary school, Dunham combed the classifieds for a job at a sushi bar but found that only Japanese speakers need apply. “The world of sushi is closed to most Western cooks,” he says. “It’s not part of the training.” So he returned to New Jersey and took a job at the Blue Point Grill in Princeton with Jack Morrison, the man he calls his mentor. “He was like a second father to me,” says Dunham, who keeps a photo of Morrison in his bedroom. “The restaurant had an incredible range of fish, and I learned an enormous amount there.” But Dunham’s interest in Japanese food wouldn’t let go, so after four years in Princeton, he headed west, thinking that if there was any place a white guy could open a sushi bar, it would be San Francisco. “I had the impression that anyone could do anything here,” he says.

By the time Midori Mushi went under, Black and Dunham were done with the hipster posing. They had a plan to open a serious sushi bar and turn the local paradigm on its head. At the time, Bay Area sushi culture seemed divided into two camps: There were bars with a relaxed atmosphere that served Americanized versions of sushi, and more traditional spots with authentic fish offered in an ultra-uptight setting. Black and Dunham wanted to put together a well-edited menu of classic nigiri and a few simple rolls, while relaxing the rules and making the experience accessible in a way that it rarely is at most traditional sushi bars.

Instead of installing a high Plexiglas case separating the chefs from the diners, Black and Dunham designed their bar with a glass-topped box flush with the surface to hold the evening’s inventory of fish. They do all their work an arm’s length from their customers, with nothing blocking their view.

“It’s frustrating to go to a sushi bar and sit in front of a foggy, scratched-up piece of plastic,” says Dunham. “You can’t see the fish, and it makes it hard to talk to the chef. We wanted to take down that barrier and open up the conversation. People are fascinated by fish but sometimes are turned off by a name they don’t recognize or something that looks strange to them. This format helps us open their minds to trying something new. We have a rule that if someone says they don’t like a particular fish, we make them try it. Most of the time, we end up with enthusiastic converts.”

Certain men get weak in the presence of sports cars or stereo equipment. Black and Dunham go stupid for fish. “I get giddy when I see one,” says Dunham. “I’ve been this way since I was a kid. It’s like Christmas for me when we unpack the fish.”

The menu at Sebo changes every day and includes many fish that aren’t recognizable, even to hardcore sushi fans—sanma (saury pike) from Hokkaido (accountability is a core value of Japanese cooking, says Black, and Sebo’s menu includes the place of origin of every fish offered); isaki (grunt); and, in place of overfished bluefin, Kindai bluefin from Japan’s Kinki University’s experimental breeding program. All the fish at Sebo comes from IMP Foods, a distributor based in Hayward that traffics in premier sushi-grade seafood from the top markets in Japan, including Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji. Many local sushi bars get their fish from IMP, but they don’t all get the same fish. “We’re willing to throw down the money for the best,” says Black. That means buying only fish that’s in season, seeking out traditional but less common (read: more costly) sushi varieties, and insisting on the highest quality. (A pair of nigiri made with the super-fatty ootoro of Kindai bluefin rings in at $26.)

Though they place their order a week in advance, Black and Dunham never know what they might find inside the box. The catch is never guaranteed, and their sales rep, Mika Higurashi, often makes last-minute substitutions to the order or tucks in a few surprises if she has something new or unusual—such as pressed and dried sea-cucumber guts or a variety of seaweed she thinks the chefs might like.

Once, Black and Dunham opened the day’s box to find something they had never seen before. “It looked like a beet or some sort of root,” says Black. “We had no idea what it was, if it was a vegetable or a fish, and we were too embarrassed to call Mika and admit our ignorance.” Instead, Black convinced Dunham to stab it with a knife. When he did, two appendages flew out of the sides. At that point, they called Higurashi, who explained that it was a hoya, or sea squirt—an organism that begins life as a mobile animal before attaching itself to a rock and spending the rest of its days filtering seawater. It has an oysterlike meat at its core, which Black and Dunham have taken to scooping out and marinating with kimchee.

While many sushi bars purchase frozen bricks of fish, the fish at Sebo is just days old, and most of it arrives whole. Black and Dunham spend the hours before the restaurant opens neatly slicing the fish into pieces that they stack in the display case on their bar, as if they were jewels. Much of the fish, particularly oily varieties like mackerel and shad, can’t safely be eaten raw and must be cured in saltwater and marinated in rice vinegar before serving. It’s a practice that’s becoming a lost art, according to Black, who says that Sebo is one of only a handful of Bay Area sushi bars that does its own curing, rather than purchasing precured, precut fish. Black and Dunham learned the craft from reading books, lobbing questions at Higurashi, and experimenting endlessly. Curing is a point of pride for the few sushi chefs who continue to practice it, and Black is especially proud of his saba—mackerel that he cures in sea salt and marinates in a base of sake lees (the mash leftover from brewing sake). It’s a recipe he’s been finessing for years.

“It’s a privilege to work with such beautiful fish,” says Dunham. “We feel a responsibility to prepare it in the most beautiful way possible.”

Improvised dishes are one of the best parts of a meal at Sebo and, according to Black, an important part of the sushi tradition. “At most sushi bars here, the kitchen is too busy making things like spider rolls to have time to improvise, but it happens all the time in Japan,” he says. “It’s an exciting process. We talk to people, let them order a few things on their own, and start to figure out their tastes. We might learn that they don’t like strong flavors, but they do like acidic ones. It narrows the range, and we start to play.”

So, for instance, a diner might be treated to a dish of uni (sea urchin) whipped with vinegar and salt and used to baste a yellowtail collar that Black grills on the stovetop. Later in the evening, he might pull out a miso-pickled eggplant from under the counter to share with a guest. “It’s the same process as improvising music,” says Black. “I have the flavors in my head, and I make it up as I go along.”

Sushi chefs have perhaps the most intimate relationship with their ingredients of any cook. They’re in constant contact with the food—squeezing every mound of rice in their palms, touching every fish with their fingers. As Black notes, “Japanese food is the result of many centuries of refinement. Cooking in Japan is often about taking away—presenting ingredients with a minimum of preparation.”

The same is true of Black and Dunham’s kitchen, which, compared with most restaurants’, is decidedly low-tech. There are no immersion circulators here, no CO₂ canisters—just a cup full of tweezers for pulling out pin bones, a few battered pots, and a couple of stovetop grills. Heat, that most elemental of cooking tools, is relegated to a supporting role: a modest four-burner stove for cooking rice and warming broths, a small blowtorch for searing fish. And then there are the knives. “All chefs are obsessed with knives,” says Dunham, who owns one worth $1,700. “They’re like tattoos. Once you get one, you want another.” Black has 25 knives in his collection.

When it comes to the difference between good sushi and bad, knife skills are second only to the quality of the fish. While no knife can make old fish taste fresh, a beautiful piece of fish can be ruined with a single stroke of the blade. Improperly cut fish can fall apart, separating at the grain, or become chewy and stringy. Japanese knives are sharp on just one side to make a clean cut through the flesh, leaving a smooth edge that maximizes mouthfeel—it’s what gives a great piece of tuna belly that melting texture. And the dexterity it takes to master that cut comes only with years of practice. It’s a skill Black and Dunham spend most of their waking hours mastering.

Once the restaurant opens, they pass along that closeness with the fish to their customers. “Feeding someone is one of the most intimate things you can do,” says Dunham, and dining in a sushi bar, particularly one like Sebo, is about as close as you can get to eating in a chef’s home kitchen without actually going there. There aren’t many restaurants where you can enjoy a meal prepared by the chef-owner from start to finish, from unpacking the day’s delivery to tucking a final garnish of daikon radish sprouts on the plate. Then he serves it to you and talks to you while you eat. When you’re done, he clears your plate and shouts good night as you walk out the door. Not even VIPs at the French Laundry get that kind of attention.

These days, Sebo rides the ups and downs that affect all small businesses, particularly local restaurants. Some evenings, there’s a long line on the sidewalk, while other nights find the two men looking nervously from the empty seats in the dining room to the expensive fish in the case in front of them. Some restaurants can use one night’s unsold chicken to make the next day’s soup, but there’s not much you can do with day-old fish at a sushi bar.

“Fish is one of the most expensive ingredients there is,” says Black, “and we spend a lot of our time educating diners [about] that fact. The quality of what we offer is on par with the best restaurants in the city.” In fact, the Kindai tuna at Sebo is the same type served at Manresa and the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton San Francisco. “But people aren’t used to paying these kinds of prices at such an unfussy restaurant,” says Black.

Not long ago, I had dinner at another sushi bar: a tiny, Japanese-run spot that often ends up on lists of the best sushi places in San Francisco. We arrived a few minutes late for our six o’clock reservation, which clearly pissed off the chef, who was profiled in a Wall Street Journal story headlined “Sushi Bullies.” He waved a hand toward two empty seats at the bar and went back to cutting fish. A waitress ran nervously around the room, avoiding eye contact; and every time she went behind the bar, the chef whispered harshly while she stared at the ground and nodded. It was like arriving at a dinner party after the hosts have had an explosive argument, but before they’ve had a chance to make up.

We took our seats and asked meekly for omakase (chef’s choice). The fish that night was beautiful, fresh, and expertly cut, but it was served too cold—the rice was warm—and each piece was seasoned with enough wasabi to bring tears to my eyes. We finished our meal in less than an hour, and as we paid our bill, a lone diner wandered in. “Just one?” the chef asked. “Just one,” the man answered. First the chef said no, then he said yes and directed him to one of several empty seats at the bar. Then the waitress mentioned a $30 minimum. And though it’s hard to imagine anyone getting out of the restaurant for less than $30 (our dinner for two came to $160, including tip), the single guy got the message and left. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

We drove past Sebo on the way home, and I caught a quick glimpse of the chefs through the door. I remembered something Black had said. “In the end, it comes down to generosity,” he told me. “If you think about it, the work sucks. The hours are awful, we never sit down, and we don’t make much money. The only satisfaction comes from feeding other people. If we weren’t in it for that, we’d burn out. There’s just no other reason to do it.”

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Jan Newberry is San Francisco’s food and wine editor.