Calistoga is cabernet country, so a modern Japanese restaurant is not what you expect to find on Lincoln Avenue. But Five Senses, which opened this summer in a small storefront that was once an antique shop, feels like nothing else in the valley, and the story behind it is better than the surprise.

Its owner and head sushi chef, Spencer Conaty, grew up in Placerville watching Iron Chef and idolizing Masaharu Morimoto. He went on to cook for Morimoto for four years, then refined his craft at the Michelin-starred Atelier Crenn and the three-star Saison in San Francisco, kitchens known for treating food as something closer to art than sustenance. Then he came home to Napa. Five Senses began as an intimate private-dining operation and has now found a permanent room, with a 25-foot sushi bar and an open kitchen where you can watch the whole team work.

You feel that lineage on the plate, though never heavily. The sushi is precise and beautiful, as you'd expect from four years in Morimoto's kitchen. But what surprised us most came off the kitchen menu. The umami pork ribs, glazed with pho spices, were meltingly tender and deeply layered, star anise and Chinese five spice running all the way through. The gyoza were just as good, each one full of flavor. This is cooking with serious technique behind it, deployed in service of something warm and soulful rather than showy, and it rewards ordering well beyond the rolls. The executive chef, Ben Cereghini, brings his own remarkable path to it, from avant-garde kitchens in Colombia and Barcelona to the French Laundry and Meadowood here at home.

Sitting at the sushi bar, all of this comes through in person. The team is genuinely chef-y, in the best sense, glad to talk you through a dish, clearly serious about the food and clearly enjoying themselves. There is ambition in the room, but no pretension, which is a difficult balance and a rare one.

That balance seems to be the whole point. Conaty has said he built Five Senses for locals as much as visitors, with a menu meant to be approachable, a place where a family and a couple on a date and a solo diner at the bar all feel equally at home. You can feel that intention. It would have been easy for a chef with this résumé to open something precious. Instead, he opened something generous. 

www.fivesensesnapa.com