BEFORE DAYLIGHT IS quite done at Michael Mina, the place looks anemic: a gray-green wash reminiscent of mosquito netting, or the inside of a huge pillowcase. Then the sun sets, the sconce lighting flares with contrapuntal oranges and yellows, and the space comes alive, as at some beach party on a South Pacific island.

Michael Mina (which bears the name of its chef, best known here for his near-decade of exertions in the kitchen at Aqua) is not a beach restaurant, of course, or a Polynesian restaurant. It is, instead, a temple of exalted cuisine that, despite having opened just a few weeks ago, already has few rivals in the city or the Bay Area or, I suspect, the entire country.

In a certain sort of haute cuisine, every bite counts: each is a complete experience of flavor and texture. Mina's variation on this principle is that sequences of bites are related but slightly differentiated. A first course of diver scallops, for instance, is subdivided into six experiences, each on its own plate; the six bites consist of three contrasting bite-pairs (a yellow-corn salad under a seared scallop, say, with summer truffles across the way), and the troika of pairings themselves cleverly compared and contrasted.

The petiteness of the bites belies the immense effort that goes not merely into preparing them – for working in intricate miniature is always exhausting – but thinking them up in the first place. Mina, not surprisingly, draws on influences that reach from Japan to the Mediterranean, yet through bite after course, the food remains coherent and disciplined, while the chef's hand remains, to appearances, light. To make this level of artifice seem natural and effortless is a kind of miracle.

And I say all this as one who does not warm easily to the once-in-a-lifetime style of cooking. Food prepared with this sort of sophistication demands the diner's constant attention, and while the experience is pleasurably stimulating, it is not relaxing. That is no doubt why the restaurant's interior design is so subdued; it is meant not merely to avoid competing with the food but to offer diners a subliminally soothing background as they go about the business of concentrating on the menu's profusion of complex dishes.

While the decorating scheme is astute in its broad sweep, some of the spatial particulars could do with a rethink. The tables for two are too wide, for one thing, and the chairs are awkward: too soft and low, so that one is forever slumping, with arms that seem to get in the way – though when you're serving food like Michael Mina's, nothing can really get in the way.

Paul Reidinger

Contact Paul Reidinger at paulr@sfbg.com.