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| - ShinBay serves the best Japanese food in Arizona, hands down. I eat out much more often than I'm comfortable admitting, and ShinBay is easily my favorite restaurant in Phoenix. I often feel like I'm overpaying when, for example, I go to a steakhouse and get a $40 filet, but for $80 the "Yu Course" at Shinbay is an absolute bargain. Honestly, I'd probably pay twice as much and still feel good about it.
I won't attempt to recite the detailed description of every item in each course that our extremely, but not overly, attentive waitress gave us, because everything, from the pine nuts in the tuna tartar to the shrimp and soy sauce reduction on the blue shrimp, had an origin story.
Normally my eyes glaze over when a server gets overly enthusiastic about the home life of the food that's on my plate, and I start thinking of that Portlandia episode. But here it somehow works - I'm all ears. Maybe because it doesn't feel at all pretentious. You can clearly see that what you're about to enjoy is as much art as food, and it demands explanation. Were the waitress to simply deliver the plate and walk away I'd be left wondering, "what's the meaning of this?", as if a museum curator forgot to put a description next to a painting.
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