For my final dinner in Southern California before heading out for my next trip, I dined with Sushi by Scratch at the SLS Beverly Hills in Los Angeles, California.

While the chefs were preparing for dinner service, we were provided with a welcome beverage and canapé service. Our beverage was a minty iced tea; our first small bite was a miniature tuna hand roll topped with salmon roe, and our second item was a very decorated chawanmushi (Japanese egg custard).

Afterwards, we were brought into the main dining area. Sushi by Scratch’s omakase experience is composed of 16 pieces of nigiri: yellowtail, fluke, ocean trout, scallop, striped jack, Japanese sea bream, golden eye snapper, albacore, tuna, amberjack, black sea bream, tuna belly, wagyu, bone marrow, eel, and sea urchin.

We also got a non-alcoholic beverage pairing to go along with the omakase, which came with three unique drinks spread out across our meal between every 5-6 pieces of nigiri.

After our 16 bites of sushi, our meal concluded with a dessert. My friend had celebrated a birthday the prior week, so I wrote a short note of that in the reservation details; we didn’t get any complementary extras, but they did put a little celebratory candle in her dessert for the occasion.

After this meal, Sushi by Scratch joined my small set of all-time favorite restaurants.

If you were paying attention to the photographs, you may have noticed that each piece of nigiri had some sort of unique sauce, topping, and/or garnish. This is what made Sushi by Scratch stand out from any other sushi restaurant I’ve been to.

All the fish they used obviously had a baseline of being very high-quality, but the extras they added on to each bite made it truly stand out. These combinations were novel enough that I, as someone who eats an insanely large amount of sushi on a regular basis, still found every single bite to be a completely new experience. I could obviously taste and recognize most of the individual ingredients, but each bite’s combined flavor profile as a whole was always something new that I had never had before.

At first, I thought the portion sizes were a bit small, but after the first few pieces of nigiri, I realized that a lot of the value you get from what you’re paying for at Sushi by Scratch is not just the amount of food, but the ability to experience the chefs’ innovative recipes and flavor combinations. It is common to go to an omakase experience and try a few experimental dishes, but it is rare to near-impossible to find a spot that adds a facet of originality and inventiveness to literally every single thing they serve.

What made this meal extra special, which ultimately just came down to luck, was that my friend and I were fortunate enough to be the only two people being served during our particular time slot. This obviously made for a much more private and cozy experience. It also allowed us to interact with the chefs on an ongoing basis throughout our meal, helping us learn more about their background and the items they were serving.

If you’re familiar with my food blog posts, you know that I usually put a cost breakdown of what I paid. Unfortunately, when I paid for the meal, I was only provided with a final transaction confirmation rather than a fully itemized receipt, so I don’t have exact prices. With that being said, I can come up with some reasonable estimates.

The base price for omakase was $185 per person. We opted to do a caviar add-on, which I believe got us extra caviar on three additional pieces of nigiri that wouldn’t have otherwise had caviar, for $65 per person; I thought this was reasonable, considering that a lot of restaurants in major cities sell caviar bumps for $20 each. I’m not sure how much the beverage pairing was, but my guess is that it was approximately $50 per person. There was a mandatory 20% service fee in lieu of gratuity, and sales tax in Los Angeles should be 9.75%. The final total charge was US$780.06.

That is definitely a big number, but don’t let that scare you away—just opting for the core omakase experience for $185 per person, which would end up being $240 per person after the mandatory service fee and sales tax, is already an amazing meal. I like caviar in general, and the drinks were delicious, but even without them, you’ll still get to fully enjoy the crux and soul of the meal.

As a side note, as I mentioned at the beginning, the Beverly Hills location of Sushi by Scratch is inside the SLS hotel, which offers valet parking only and charges $20 for it. We avoided this by going to the nearby Beverly Center first, parking inside their parking garage, doing some shopping, then walking a couple blocks to the restaurant afterwards. I didn’t confirm whether Beverly Center has dynamic pricing, but for us, we only had to pay $4 by the time we made our way back and headed out. I think this is a good alternative if you are not a fan of other people touching and driving your vehicle, want to get in a short walk to stay active and healthy, and/or want to save a little bit of money (maybe to put it towards that caviar upsell).

Overall, I highly recommend Sushi by Scratch… but with a caveat. For lack of a better way to put this, I think Sushi by Scratch is an “intermediate-level” restaurant. Anyone—even sushi first-timers—can obviously have an enjoyable meal here, but I think you need at least a little bit of sushi experience to truly conceptualize, understand, and internalize why Sushi by Scratch is so special.