Zuma at The Guild Hotel, San Diego
Luxury Japanese restaurant brand Zuma is opening at the Guild Hotel this summer in downtown San Diego, marking its first California location. The move places the city more firmly within a high-end global hospitality circuit that it has historically operated just outside of.
Since launching in London in 2002, the contemporary izakaya restaurant has expanded into cities that already treat dining as cultural infrastructure and whose diners also love a bit of a scene—Hong Kong, Dubai, Istanbul, Miami, New York, Rome, Mykonos, Madrid, Riyadh, Ibiza. The brand’s rooms are large, tightly designed environments where sushi and robata anchor the menu, but the space’s energy does just as much work. Dinner rarely feels like the end of the night. At many Zuma locations, there are also pools and beaches.
The San Diego build follows that model. The restaurant will span approximately 12,000-square-feet and will seat around 270 guests. It will be an indoor-outdoor concept designed around a formal arrival sequence: Guests enter through a tunnel and approach from a terrace before reaching the dining room, rather than passing through a traditional hotel lobby.
Inside, Zuma’s signature design language carries through—modern Japanese elements layered with natural materials and low lighting create a comfortable yet quietly luxurious aesthetic.
The way Kevin Mansour, The Guild Hotel and Granger Hotel co-founder, describes Zuma is like it’s the 1970’s conversation pit of restaurants: a lifestyle-driven room people build evenings around. In other markets, he notes, it’s common for guests to show up late or drift in after dinner elsewhere.
