There is a Japanese restaurant in Gubei so clean you wear socks to the bathroom. So popular they have three branches with 300 seats each and you still have to reserve. So goddamn good at service that the waitress can tell you the biological variety of sea urchin on the menu. So delicious that it passed my test by a gauntlet of chefs and semi-professional eating people.

Sasano.

It is disingenuous to pretend Sasano is a hidden secret, one of those mind-blowing Japanese bolt holes we all know exist but don’t know how to find. Just one of Sasano’s locations has 25,000 — twenty five THOUSAND — pictures from customers on its Dianping page. Bringing it to you here is sort of like introducing a FOB Japanese person to Element Fresh, and telling them you’ve got this great Western restaurant they probably have never heard of but really need to check out, though I promise Sasano is much better than Element Fresh (and that’s not a dig at EF).

So last month I took seven friends who work in F&B as chefs, food education people, writers or those who are just generally blessed with two stomachs and a capacity to talk about food for hours, and we ordered like we had been rescued after 46 days on a life raft in the South Pacific. I’ve been to Sasano many times over the years. It’s my go-to for mid-range but very nice Japanese food. But I wanted to map out its menu, probe it for weakness and figure out the absolute best way to approach it. I did. We did. I’m still full as I write this, 12 hours later, and feel a bit queasy about the thought of lunch and dinner today.

But first a note on just how clean Sasano is. It is worth remarking on. The entire place is covered in tatami mats, and the servers (and you) are all on a sock-only basis. (It’s really lots of fun to slide for 100 meters on tatami mats, like ice skating, gliding on your socks without picking your feet up off the floor.) If the bathroom is a proxy for the kitchen, the kitchen must be set-up like a Foxconn clean-room. This is high-powered hygiene.

And then the service. Sasano is a three-star restaurant with five-star service. That, and the prices, are no doubt what have made it a winning combination in Shanghai. Every room, and most of Sasano is private rooms, has a little button to summon your waitress, and you never have to press twice. They can explain the menu down to the merits of certain fish cuts over others, and when you go to that pristine bathroom, they wait outside until you are finished so they can guide you back through the maze of private rooms to your friends.

***

But it’s my job to guide you through the menu, which has some outstanding dishes — and a few duds.

The first and most important consideration is that you need to be mentally prepared to pay 800rmb for a crab. A huge crab. A massive crab. When we went, this crab.

That’s a Japanese snow crab and it weighed 1.6 kilos, at 500rmb per kilo. These are the things you see on the Discovery Channel, hauled onto the deck of some weather-beaten fishing boat in the lashing rain in a cage that weighs as much as a car. They are fun to watch on TV. They are even better steamed.

Ours arrived with a part of the shell of each leg shaved off, like they opened the lid on the crab meat, which is much more thoughtful than the usual amateur surgery and barbaric hammering one must do to eat a crab. Every place should serve crabs like this (and I believe most in Japan do). What seems like a lot of money for one dish quickly starts to feel like a bargain when you see how big and how fresh and how sweet the crabs are. Anyone who likes crab should go eat crabs at Sasano. Highest recommendation.

Sasano is a really difficult place to pull background information from. They flatly deny media interviews on the grounds that they are already too busy, and they don’t want the hassle, and even after calling all three branches and talking to various employees, I can’t tell you for certain, but it seems that the snow crabs are in season during the spring/summer, the Japanese hairy crabs (a totally different animal to the Chinese ones) are in season during the fall and winter, and Alaskan king crabs seems to be in season all the time – or at least, they’ve been there every time I’ve gone.

On a side note, this is also why I can’t even tell you who owns or runs Sasano. Some people say it’s Taiwanese. One employee told us the owner is from Sichuan. It’s hard to believe it’s not Japanese. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because whoever did it created an environment that feels like Japan.

Back to the food. The consensus from our table is crab first. Make it the centerpiece of your meal. Then pick off other dishes around the menu to compliment it.

The avocado salad is especially nice, because they use a whole avocado per salad, they are always perfectly ripe, and the dressing is delicious. Surprising? No. Delicious? Yes.

The black garlic is another good pick, a Korean ingredient that became trendy a few years ago. The garlic is naturally cured at a high temperature, which is what turns it black, and because it’s made from single-bulb garlic, it ends up looking like a small onyx chestnut. The flavor is hard to describe – an intense, extremely complex and almost fruity food. I told my friends it tastes like a good chicken bouillon cube, with that delicious savory flavor, but apparently that ruined it for some people, so we came up with something like an extremely concentrated date with hints of Shaoxing wine. It’s an enigma.

The other defining feature of Sasano is sashimi, and not just their sashimi, but how it’s cut – pornographically thick. An order of regular salmon (as opposed to belly or other cuts) is the same number of slices as most other places, but twice as much fish. Some people like this (size queens). Some are intimidated. All are in awe of the knife that cuts such a generous portion of salmon for 98rmb.

The final thing you should order are the peony shrimp. Again, you’ve got to suck it up a little bit. They range from 50 to 90rmb each, depending on size, for a single shrimp, but, man, what a shrimp it is. They are served raw, heads and tails on, ice cold, with sweet, firm meat. They do double duty, too. After you have eaten the shrimp, save the head, and the waitress will ask you if you’d like to have it made into soup (a good option) or deep-fried and served back to you (a better option). The latter is one of the restaurant’s best bites, crunchy and oily and shrimpy and begging for a beer, which is draft Kirin and 20rmb.

Your order should probably end there. Your bill will be probably be about 350rmb each, a little more if your group is small.

Let’s not dwell on the negative but these are the things you should not order at Sasano, either for price or flavor: sake (the price-to-quality ratio is off; order shochu instead); sushi rolls; the fried chicken (more like a fritter, not crispy); the “extra large” sea urchin (fresh, clean, beautiful and flavorless); tuna (debatable but not outstanding); and the foie gras chawan mushi (low quality, over-cooked foie). The steamed clams in sake are nice — and don’t they look lovely in this picture? — but perhaps on the boring side of mild.

By the time my group finished dinner, it was getting late. The Sasano kitchen closes at 9.30pm and we had stayed well past that, drinking and clearing our plates. The waitstaff was all smiles and socks, and by the time we finally left, from a different entrance than the one we had come in, they had figured out yet another way to impress us.

As we slid towards the shoe-putting-on area, we stopped and had a moment of admiration for a restaurant that, after you’ve paid, well after they need to care about you, bothered to align all of our footwear with the heels on a single axis and then arranged boy-girl-boy-girl-boy-girl. It’s details like this that make Sasano worth going to.

Just remember to wear nice socks.

***

All of Sasano's locations are listed here.