What is Tomu-San Sushi?
Tomu-San Sushi is the Japanese restaurant that Tom Kaufman opened in November 2025 at 20825 N Pima Road, Suite 100, on Market Street at DC Ranch, the village center at Pima Road and Thompson Peak Parkway. The name is Kaufman’s own, with the Japanese honorific attached, and the location is the one he has spent a decade building around: his wine lounge The Living Room is directly across the street, his mole house Elvira’s at DC Ranch is next door, and his speakeasy The Peacock is behind the first of those. Tomu-San is the third Kaufman Hospitality room on the block.
The space is 2,798 square feet and has a history. It opened in 2012 as Keeler Hospitality’s Market Street Kitchen, became the Keelers’ second Liberty Station tavern in October 2018, and sat empty after that closed. Kaufman told What Now Phoenix in September 2025 that when he envisioned a sushi restaurant, “I knew it had to be here at Market Street,” and that he understood the flavor profiles of the neighborhood well enough to turn diners into regulars.
To cook it he hired Christopher George, who spent twenty years at Roy’s, the Hawaiian-fusion chain, and the menu reads that way: a misoyaki black cod, an “aloha ponzu” on half the rolls, a char siu surf-and-turf fried rice, alongside a straight nigiri list of maguro, kanpachi, bluefin toro and sea bream, an omakase counter with tiered menus, Japanese whiskies, sake flights and zero-proof pairings. The room, by its own description, is minimalist, daylit through the windows, with bamboo, bonsai and an open kitchen; the opening press called it “sanctuary and spectacle.”
It is for DC Ranch and Silverleaf, which had no sushi within walking distance of Market Street before, and for anyone who wants a Japanese dinner north of the 101 without the Quarter’s parking garage. Our verdict: a well-run neighborhood sushi house with a Roy’s accent, priced fairly, and at lunch one of the better values in North Scottsdale.
Ordering at Tomu-San
Book the hour, not just the table. The website lists summer hours of 4 to 9 p.m. daily with happy hour 4 to 6 p.m. every day, and In Business Magazine reported in April 2026 that lunch runs 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily. Tables are on OpenTable; omakase seats and private events go by email through the site. The core menu is dated March 2026 and says it changes daily with the fish, so treat the prices below as the published floor.
Start with the kitchen’s showpieces. The sizzling truffle kanpachi ($24, amberjack with truffle soy, garlic and crispy shallots) and the hamachi jalapeño tiradito ($22, aloha citrus ponzu, cilantro, sriracha) are the two starters that show George’s Roy’s training. The wagyu gyoza ($18) and the Szechuan BBQ spare ribs ($18) are the crowd-pleasers; the spicy salmon crispy rice “tots” ($16) are the bar snack.
The rolls are the fun. Signature rolls run $19 to $30: the TFK ($27, Miyazaki wagyu, lobster, crispy asparagus), the lollipop ($30, cucumber-wrapped tuna, salmon, hamachi and lobster), The Living Room ($23) and the Peacock ($19), named for the sister rooms. Classic rolls are $9 to $22. Nigiri is priced per piece and sashimi per three: maguro, kanpachi, hamachi, unagi and sea bream at $5/$14, salmon $4/$10, bluefin toro $10/$27.
From the fire. The misoyaki black cod ($49) is the signature, miso-lacquered with sunomono cucumber and a sizzling shoyu vinaigrette. The prime ribeye ($49) comes with smoked tare butter and kizami wasabi, the prime filet ($44) with a Japanese whisky jus and miso potato purée, the charred Korean BBQ short rib ($32) with gochujang and kimchi. The charred teriyaki chicken ($24) is the budget plate. At lunch the misoyaki black cod bento is $19, with miso soup, house salad and a lobster California roll, and there are poke nachos and a $28 lollipop roll.
Drink the flights. The happy hour sake flights, three two-ounce pours each, are $14 (three styles: a junmai ginjo, a nigori, a junmai) and $18 (“Tom’s Favorites”: Hide & Seek junmai ginjo, Joto “72 Clocks” daiginjo, Blue Hue honjozo). Cocktails are $16 to $19: a TS Old Fashioned with oolong-infused Woodford and pandan liqueur ($19), a saketini ($18), a yuzu skinny margarita ($18). The menu says no separate checks and no cash cards.
Getting there. Park on Market Street or behind The Living Room; the three Kaufman rooms are within a hundred feet: a flight here, mole at Elvira’s, a nightcap at The Peacock. The DC Ranch guide covers the rest of the street.
The man who owns a third of Market Street
Market Street was built in 2003 to give a master-planned community a main street, and for its first decade the restaurants came and went the way they do in planned centers. The building at 20825 N Pima Road tells that story on its own: Keeler Hospitality opened Market Street Kitchen there in September 2012, with a wood-fired rotisserie and James Beard winner Robert McGrath consulting, rebranded it as Liberty Station in October 2018 when smokehouses were the Valley’s casual-dining vocabulary, and eventually let that go too. By 2025 the suite was the largest empty room on the street.
Tom Kaufman had been across the road the whole time. A DC Ranch resident and sommelier by training, he opened The Living Room in 2014 in the old Armitage Wine Lounge corner, with its self-serve wine wall and wraparound patio, and added The Peacock speakeasy behind it in 2023. In January 2025 he opened Elvira’s next door to the empty Liberty Station, with chef Ruben Monroy of the 1927 Tubac mole house. The sushi restaurant was the obvious third move: it filled the hole in the block and the hole in the neighborhood’s menu, since the nearest sushi of any ambition was at the Quarter or on Hayden Road.
The announcement came in two parts. On September 15, 2025, What Now Phoenix reported that Kaufman had taken the 2,798-square-foot Liberty Station space for a sushi restaurant with a “late-night feel,” craft beer and Japanese whiskey, expected by the end of the year. On October 3, AZ Big Media named the chef, Christopher George, a twenty-year veteran of Roy’s, and gave a November opening; Arizona Foothills and In Business Magazine followed with the same date. George’s quoted line, that at Tomu-San “we stage a narrative, one piece at a time,” is press-release talk, but the menu he wrote is grounded: a Roy’s-style black cod, a tight nigiri list, rolls named for the sister restaurants, a $19 lunch bento. Mouth by Southwest reported the restaurant open on December 3, 2025, calling the menu “playful rather than precious.”
What the record does not say: the exact opening day, the seat count, the omakase price. No Valley critic had reviewed the room by October 2026; the coverage is announcement press, a blog item and a trade magazine’s lunch feature, and the site still showed “summer hours” in the fall. That is normal for a year-old neighborhood restaurant.
Honest assessment: Tomu-San is not a destination sushi bar in the Shinbay sense, and it is not trying to be. It is a well-priced, well-run neighborhood Japanese restaurant with a Hawaiian-fusion accent, in a room with good light, owned by the one restaurateur who has proved he can keep a Market Street address open for a decade. For DC Ranch that is exactly the restaurant that was missing, and the lunch bento alone justifies the detour from the 101.