The film “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” gave us an image of a sushi master as a wizened elder with the experience of a long apprenticeship — with up to five years of menial work before being allowed to make the sushi rice, and several more years before being allowed to slice ginger and negi — followed by years of toiling to earn the trust and respect of peers and diners.

Here, a young face at the counter stirs excitement over possibilities associated with the new. There, it’s, “Pfft, what could he possibly know?”

Believing in the myth of the elder behind the sushi counter, my first photos at Beniya were for naught, when the older man I was photographing turned out to be an itamae, or assistant. The restaurant is the namesake of 34-year-old Hirofumi Beniya, who grew up living and breathing sushi. His father was a sushi chef so even as a child, he was cleaning and gutting fish, and learning all about the fish in the waters surrounding his home in Ishikawa prefecture, Honshu island.

The ocean offered up one of Ishikawa’s best-kept secrets, noto nodoguro, which can be compared to a fatty menpachi, that rarely appears in Tokyo restaurants. If you’re lucky, it will be available when you show up for one of the chef’s $125 omakase dinners. Given the high price of dining out, and of Japanese omakase — which has climbed to $250 to $300 per person — a trip to Beniya’s sushi bar seemed like a relative bargain, given the luxe ingredients and painstaking presentation.

The restaurant is among about 16 new dining establishments that comprise Waikiki Yokocho, a restaurant alley in the basement of the Waikiki Shopping Plaza. Beniya is on the left at the Kalakaua Avenue entrance of the yokocho, and is divided into two areas.

The main dining room features a menu of hot and cold Japanese specialties that are not particularly distinctive save for an excellent kaisen rainbow chirashizushi bowl ($18) that recently featured maguro, salmon, Hokkaido uni, ikura, snapper, unagi and cucumbers.

It’s at the sushi bar where you’ll be accorded VIP treatment and an audience with Beniya.

A recent omakase (dinner only) featured 20 items, including dessert of yuzu sorbet.

Wouldn’t you know, the first dish offered was shirako (cod sperm sac), one that would test many a diner’s mettle. I’m generally up for anything — which is the nature of omakase, leaving each selection up to the chef — but I didn’t want to deal with the possibility of spitting out food. The first time I tried shirako, it was cooked to a dry, chalky consistency, and I didn’t care for it. This time it was more like a silky, sweet flan or chawanmushi, much milder and comparable to the best uni. So if you like any of those foods, this will be no problem. The flavor is great; it’s just a matter of overcoming mental culinary taboos.

After that, the rest was easy. First came a trio of appetizers: Seattle oyster slow-cooked with shoyu and bonito flakes; thin-sliced moi with minced daikon in ponzu sauce; Maine lobster tail with an egg wash to bring out its sweetness; and monkfish liver with mountain potato.

This was followed by sashimi of Big Island moi with daikon, and thin-sliced myoga (Japanese ginger). Also among the decadent offerings were cubes of A5 Miyazaki wagyu, Hokkaido bafun uni nigiri, flounder engawa, Kanagawa bluefin nigiri — the fish scored to hold on to a light brush of shoyu — and sweet Kauai amaebi nigiri. The head turned up toward the end of the meal in a savory miso soup.

At the end came a trio of torotaku roll pieces featuring a mixture of pickled daikon and bluefin otoro. This is the new standard for maki rolls in Japan, as the crunchy daikon tempers the richness of the fattiest part of the tuna belly.

Should you wander over to the main dining room, you’ll still be able to get nigiri and sushi rolls a la carte, at $8 for salmon, squid, maguro and anago (saltwater eel); $9 for kampachi, tai, shimaaji or shrimp; and $13 for chutoro, ikura, a California roll or dragon roll.

Hot dishes include chicken karaage ($15) and slices of abalone ($25) cooked in a sauce of butter and shoyu. I would be happy with just the chirashi and fatty, rare A5 wagyu tataki ($35) alone.

The most unique of the offerings are single-serve nabes, seafood hotpots with dashi or a tomato-based broth ($18 each), or chicken and vegetables in green curry ($18) that was surprisingly spicy. The ingredients for the curry arrived precooked, so all that was needed was a quick dip in the curry. That was a good thing because the heat of the flame combined with the small size of the pot meant the soup reduced down quickly, becoming saltier and less palatable minute by minute. I recommend having a staffer douse the flame before it gets to that point. If you ordered the chirashi and have leftover rice, you can enjoy the remainder with the curry.

Also great for eyes and palate are donburi bowls, the rice topped with salmon poke ($18), maguro ($22) or unagi with kabayaki sauce and tamago ($35).