Silicon Valley Japanese Restaurant Caters to Tech Bros With Gold-Encrusted Steak

The Bay Area is home to the most astronomical rent prices in America, largely thanks to the subset of highly paid white-collar workers known colloquially as “tech bros.” In between working long hours at Apple, Google, or any one of thousands of young, hungry startups and sleeping too few hours at their $3,500-a-month one-bedroom apartments, tech bros gotta eat too (unless they’re surviving solely on Soylent, that is).

The rise of this young and moneyed demographic means San Francisco is home to many of the nation’s priciest restaurants, with a meal for two at places such as Saison and The Restaurant at Meadowood clocking in at over $1,000. But commuting from Silicon Valley to SF just for dinner isn’t always practical — so a restaurateur in Los Altos (approximately 40 miles south of San Francisco and just around the corner from Google headquarters) has opened an exclusive, high-dollar dining destination to cater to the area’s elite diners. Called Hiroshi, the restaurant does not take walk-ins and has only a single table where it seats eight diners a night, as Business Insider discovered.

Dinner costs $395 per person (if say, a party of five wants to book the restaurant they’ll have to buy out the other three seats, too), though BI notes it’s more like $600 a head after drinks, tax, and tip. The menu includes luxurious dishes such as uni, somen noodles with caviar, and wagyu beef cooked over a hibachi — the latter ostentatiously garnished with gold flakes. (Nothing signals an impending class war quite like tech executives literally stuffing their faces with precious metals, amiright?)

“The only thing that turned me off was the gold flake,” one Yelp reviewer writes of Hiroshi. “Gold flake looks nice but it does not add any flavor to the food.” Of course, neither does hand-cut crystal glassware or pricey remote-control bidets in the bathroom, but that’s seemingly beside the point.

Hungry for high-dollar Japanese steak but don’t want to spend quite that much? Stay tuned for Wagyumafia, a Tokyo export headed to SF that will serve a $180 beef katsu sandwich.

• Inside the Silicon Valley Restaurant Where Tech Execs Eat Gold-Flecked Steaks [BI]
• Tokyo’s Wagyumafia Bringing $180 Sandwich to San Francisco [ESF]