When our food began to arrive, we shifted our conversation from Chef Terp to his cuisine. We began our meal with the Spicy Tuna Tataki and asked Chef Terp how he prepares it. "It’s Akami tuna, which is closer to the center of the tuna, so it's a meatier portion of the tuna," he explained. "It's not the desired fatty toro, but I think it has a better flavor; it just doesn't have the higher fat content. We take the sinew off the Akami, because with most things -- like a salmon … when you slice salmon it has all those little white lines of sinew -- those are a little bit chewy. With our sushi and sashimi and our salads we clean the sinew off. We take full loin pieces, so it's just the actual muscle that we use. That's what is special about the tuna itself, and all of our toro as well. There's no bite to it; there's nothing but meat. Then we have a vinegar fish sauce with some Japanese Togaroshi in it with fresh lime juice and micro cilantro."

Our next decadent indulgence was the Toro Tartare with Caviar. "It’s kind of my culmination, what I think of as the perfect bite," Chef Terp said. "It's creamy, it's salty, it’s a little sweet and it's very buttery. It's just like spreading the ocean on a piece of bread. We have a baker that does special bread for us -- it’s got a very high content of butter, but without having the egg yolks of a brioche. It's not overpowering like a brioche. It kind of floats away as you eat it. It's there and then it's gone. The texture of the bread is what we like. The caviar on top is Royal Transmontanus caviar (ossetra)."