An H. Moser Vantablack Tourbillon at Big Sur's Eight-Seat Omakase

Since as far back as the 1980s, I've been aware that due to harsh winter weather, the Pacific Coast Highway (or PCH or Highway 1 or the 1 as we say in Southern California) shuts down in and around Big Sur. Usually rock slides, sometimes mud slides, I remember a closure affecting a childhood trip up to the Bay Area. My father was heartbroken we couldn't make the full drive, as not only was he an immigrant to the U.S. but one of those transplants who simply could not get over the physical beauty of the Golden State. While I'd argue that the California/Oregon border is actually the most beautiful part of the State, it's hard to deny just how breathtaking Big Sur is. We had a nasty series of storms a few years back, which resulted in PCH through Big Sur being closed for three years, 2023 to 2026. January of 2026 to be exact, a few months early. The second I heard the good news I planned a trip to the Wild Coast Sushi Bar, a tiny, 8-person omakase counter inside Treebones Resort.

Treebones is located north of Ragged Point, the southernmost point of Big Sur, and the point where the coastal flats of San Simeon begin sharply rising into the fog and redwood-shrouded Santa Lucia Mountains. The appropriately whacked-out hippie hotel (forget the yurts, twig huts, and 3D-printed cove, you can literally spend the night in a human-sized bird nest) is a few miles past Gorda, but if you see signs for Plaskett you've gone too far. As mentioned, Wild Coast Sushi Bar seats a grand total of eight souls. Chef Yancy Knapp, along with his sous chef, DJ Underwood, started this semi-secret sushi spot ten years ago and it's been just the two of them ever since. Do they still enjoy it? "Things got much harder when we started doing two services per night," says Chef Yancy. Laughing, he says yes. DJ nods in agreement. The chopstick holders and some of the other countertop knickknacks are pieces of jade collected from the local beaches and transformed by DJ.

Reservations, as you might have guessed, are a bit tricky to get as Wild Coast is booked out months and months in advance, especially now that PCH is open again. Luckily for those of you reading this and my stomach, I have a woman on the inside. The plan could have been very simple. Just book a seat and eat. But why do simple?

Better to make sure I get the appropriate car to drive, to grab the appropriate watch to wear, and find a semi-decent person to dine with. For the car, I snagged a 2026 Lexus LC 500 Convertible. What many consider the most beautiful road in the world demands a drop top, and I figured a naturally aspirated, 471 horsepower V8 would be just about enough. Next, I asked one of my favorite dream brands to supply me with an appropriate timepiece: H. Moser & Cie sent over an Endeavour Tourbillon Concept Vantablack on a black alligator strap. The dining companion is a friend who knows an awful lot about wine.

Lots to unpack with the watch. H. Moser & Cie is a tiny, family-owned Swiss independent founded in 1828 and based near Schaffhausen, building only around 1,500 watches a year. It is known for two things: dials so clean they often wear no logo, no numerals and no markers at all, and a streak of industry-needling humor backed by serious in-house craftsmanship. For example, and one of my all-time favorite watches, is a piece from Moser's Swiss Alp Watch line that looks like an Apple Watch, has no hands but a minute repeater complication (it chimes out the time) and a tourbillon. In other words, it's a watch that won't tell you the time when you look at it. Oh, and it stickered for $350,000. I say stickered because they sold out. One of the better examples of a stealth wealth middle finger I've ever seen. No, I don't know how to set it.

The Vantablack Endeavour is less tongue-in-cheek, but no less fascinating. The "Concept" in its name is Moser-speak for a dial stripped of everything: no logo, no markers, nothing but a flying tourbillon turning at six o'clock. Render that dial in Vantablack and it reads as a pure black void with a single mechanism quietly breathing inside it. If you don't know, Vantablack is one of the darkest man-made materials on Earth. The only thing meaningfully darker is something like the inside of a black hole, where light checks in and never checks out. Vantablack is made from billions of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes that trap up to 99.965 percent of visible light, making it the pitchest of pitch blacks. There's a tourbillon there, of course (a one-minute flying tourbillon mated to Moser's signature double hairspring, driven by the in-house automatic HMC 804 caliber with roughly a three-day power reserve, the whole thing housed in a 42mm white gold case with sapphire front and back), and it clocks in at around $75,000.

The drive up was the watch's first test. Top down, the coast throwing hard afternoon light off the hood, and the Vantablack dial flatly refused to play along, sitting on my wrist like a hole cut out of the daylight while the polished white gold case and hands flashed around it. At 42mm across and just 11.6mm thick, it slipped under a shirt cuff without complaint, which is more than most tourbillons can manage.

The car and the watch and friend settled, time to eat the fish. Wild Coast Sushi Bar is an 18-course tasting menu, all prepared right in front of you as the sun sets over the Pacific right in front of you. To call the visual setting scenic is an understatement worthy of a fine. It's one of the greatest views in any restaurant found anywhere in the world. Omakase simply means you eat what the chef places in front of you. The only choice to make is beverage, beer, wine, or sake. There's even a beverage pairing you can add on for an additional $100. Despite my pal's proclivity for fermented grape must, we opted to go for a nice bottle of sake. We then sat attempting to take photographs of the sunset as we realized in real time the limitations of the iPhone's camera. The cozy, if not teeny room is filled with all sorts of cool sushi hardware. Killer knives and such. I was wondering if the Vantablack Endeavour fit in with the Pacific Rim décor when the food began to be placed on the riser in front of us.

The first of our 18 courses arrived, a spring roll so pretty I (almost) had second thoughts about eating it; wrapped in translucent rice paper and filled with fatty tuna, amberjack, finely julienned cucumbers, seaweed, and purple micro princess flowers with a chunk or two of jalapeño tossed in because why not? Truly a feast for several senses, and an incredible way to kick off a meal. Next came my favorite plate of the evening, a seemingly simple grilled black cod, but it was anything but. Perfectly cooked, coated in just a wee amount of miso glaze and a side of tart Japanese plum paste, this is the sort of dish you happily travel 258 miles for. The next three courses were all delicious: a cold oyster, halibut on kelp, chawanmushi (hot egg custard whipped with dashi and filled with little treats like mushroom, radishes and fish), but they were just a warm up for the main event. Somewhere between the oyster and the custard I caught myself glancing at my wrist, more reflex than need. With no markers anywhere on that dial, reading the time off two leaf-shaped hands is mostly an educated guess, which felt about right for a night I'd stopped wanting to know the time at all.

While we were enjoying our first dishes, we watched as DJ the sous chef ground real wasabi from a root right in front of us. I was bouncing off of my stool as the overwhelming majority of wasabi consumed in the U.S. is just horseradish mixed with mustard and food dye. The real stuff, the good stuff, is nine times out of ten found in Japan. Wild Coast Sushi found a grower in Oregon. The later dishes were mostly prepped by DJ**, while Chef Yancy butchered the fish.** The main event then, was to watch chef Yancy as he constructed all 64 pieces of nigiri we'd be consuming that evening. One by one, he reached into a vat of rice, formed a little rice-rectangle with one hand, dabbed on a touch of freshly ground wasabi, laid down one of the eight types of raw fish, and finished each piece with a brush of nikiri, the soy-based glaze that does the seasoning at the counter.

Chef Yancy began at one end of the L-shaped counter, placing a single piece of nigiri sushi in front of each diner, and then beginning the process all over again. The thinking being that by the time he placed all eight pieces, the first diner would be fully ready to eat the next piece. We were told you could eat it in one or two bites, eater's choice. Of the eight yummy fish we consumed, one stood out to me: Kohada. Oily and delicious and native to Asian waters, kohada is the sushi-trade name for the dotted gizzard shad, whose real name is konoshiro (scientifically Konosirus punctatus). However, when it's under three inches in length it's called shinko, and only when it grows to over four inches is it called kohada. Because it's such a bony and fussy fish to work with, sushi geeks consider kohada preparation to the best way to gauge a chef's skill. Let me tell you, Chef Yancy pays the bills. Just magnificent.

We also had a lovely trout, some yellowtail, white shrimp, aji (Japanese horse mackerel), and three different cuts from a tuna, chutoro (medium fatty), otoro (like butter), and akami (like rib meat, off the spine). By this point in the evening, and by that point into the bottle of sake, I was good. At some point I rested my forearm on the counter and turned the watch over. Through the sapphire back you can watch the central rotor of the HMC 804 swing as it winds, the one piece of this watch that wants to be seen rather than hide. Three days of reserve meant it would still be running when I pointed the Lexus south in the morning. More courses followed (miso, some maki, a cooked eel, tamago, and a lovely strawberry dessert) but I wasn't taking mental notes. I was just loving the moment. By the end of the service, we offered the chefs some glasses of sake and they readily accepted. We blew smoke up their backsides and they smiled and took it. Then I was handed the mostly prepaid bill, because the bottle of sake had been added to it. Excluding the booze, the bill was $208.50 per person, and that included a gratuity. Yeah, I live in a food bubble and am horrible with money, but my only thought was to reach into my wallet and leave another $100 on top. I've eaten more than my fair share of sushi, and the Wild Coast Sushi Bar experience is worth so much more than we paid. My advice? Reserve a seat or two by the end of this sentence. Enjoy the drive.