The Rake Magazine

Tag: fish

  • Sushi: The Naked Truth, part three

    Before we opened in January, I had my whole core team working with me, training at the restaurant in Eau Claire. I knew with all of the bad habits and the lack of outside chefs in the twin cities area it would be best not to hire locally and have to correct bad habits. I’m not saying there are not good chefs in the area, but the top chefs are already employed at good establishments — such as Nami’s, Origami’s, and Fujiya — and out of respect of the owners I would not try to steal their chefs.

    However, as business grows and you need to hire it’s tough to train a chef ground up when you are short handed. I buckled and hired a local chef that had experience and could work under me. I knew it would be tough as bad habits are hard to break, but this experience opened my eyes even more to how bad some places in the area are cutting corners. On the second day I had asked him to cut down and trim a hamachi (yellow tail) for me as I was swamped at my station. I watched his knife skills. He did well, and in no time the hamachi was broken down. All was good until he handed the hamachi to me!

    Shocked, I asked him why he hadn’t trimmed the bloodline completely away? His answer was that most of the places in which he had worked in the area had instructed him not to trim it all away because it’s too expensive! Almost speechless, I trimmed away the remaining bloodline, and told him that we do trim all of it away and discard it. Later in the evening, when it slowed down, I was talking to him about the hamachi, and he told me most places cut up the bloodline and add it to the spicy tuna as a filler so they get a larger yield! NASTY!! The bloodline is a part of some fish that is very strong and fishy and should always be trimmed away and discarded.

    He is a good chef, has good knife skills, makes beautiful sushi, but again it all comes down to the dedication and preparation of the establishment. I won’t go into detail on the places that cuts corners, but I assure you that we do not cut corners and some of the places in town like Nami’s, Origami’s, and Fujiya’s also carry on the strict policy of providing only the best.

  • Tuna Tuna

    Ahi tuna: many people know tuna as ahi tuna. However, there isn’t a species named ahi. Ahi means ”tuna” in the Hawaiian language, so if you ask for Ahi tuna, all you are asking for is "tuna" tuna! Sometimes I like to just mess with people when they ask if I have ahi tuna: I ask what kind of tuna? "Ahi," they reply. "Yellow fin, big eye, or blue fin?" I ask. "No, Ahi!"

    Most sushi bars carry three kinds of tuna; yellowfin, albacore, and big eye. The better sushi bars will also carry a fourth named blue fin. So next time you are dining out and you see ahi tuna on the menu, and you are feeling a little snobbish, ask what kind of ahi it is and see if they know… a good chef should know there is no such thing is Ahi tuna.

  • Sushi Bar Etiquette

    Good thing we are not in old school Japan and that most elder Japanese/Japanese-trained chefs in the U.S. have adopted our ways.

    I could care less how you eat your sushi at the bar or at a table, but with some chefs it could get you kicked out!

    Basic sushi bar etiquette:

    Oshibori (hot towel) sushi is finger food, except sashimi; and the hot towel provided is to clean your hands before you eat. Please don’t blow your nose or take a sponge bath with that nice, hot wash cloth.

    Gari (pickled ginger) is provided to cleanse your palette in between different fishes, rolls, or sashimi, so the flavor does not carry over — and to cleanse your mouth when you are finished. Gari is not a salad.

    Fingers: Yes you all have five, so use them. Since sushi is finger food, use your fingers to eat the nigiri or rolls. Some people complain when the rolls are not packed tight enough and the rice falls apart — same goes for nigiri. Good sushi is supposed to melt in your mouth, and a good chef will not pack the rice into a hard ball. Nothing wrong with using chop sticks, but unless you can use them proficiently, the sushi will most likely fall apart.

    Soy sauce: It’s not to be used like ketchup with fries! If you do need soy sauce, dip the nigiri or maki in lightly. If it’s nigiri, turn it around and dip it in fish side down so that you don’t soak all of the soy with the rice. Same goes for rolls: dip the corner of the roll; don’t give it a bath. Light dipping will allow you to enjoy the wonderful flavors of each fish or roll, and one of the biggest reasons sushi falls apart is from the rice getting logged with soy sauce.

    Do not give dirty/empty plates back to the sushi chef. They are dirty; we work with our hands. Put them to the side for your server to clear.

    One bite: Sushi is meant to be eaten in one bite. Please do not cut the nigiri, sashimi, or rolls. By doing so you will lose the intended flavor combination. Yeah, go ahead and stuff your mouth. It’s not rude. Just like slurping noodles, it’s the Asian culture, and shows the chef you are are enjoying the food.

    Watch this funny video if you have not seen it before.

    Oh, and buy your chef a drink. He/she will appreciate it. And if you get them a bit drunk your slices will get bigger!! We don’t want to cut off our fingers as we start to see blurrs!!

     

  • Sake 101

    Saturday, March 1st at 6:30 p.m. we will be hosting a sake educational tasting, a Sake 101 of sorts. We will have three sakes and possibly a namazaki. The three sakes that will be available have a deep and long history, along with taste. Shichihon yari is Japan’s oldest brewery, founded in 1540 — before Tokyo was even a city! To date, it is still run by the same family members and with only a staff of four producing the sake in small batches.

    Watari Bune is amazing because we shouldn’t even be drinking this sake! The reason for this is that the watari bune rice was grown in 1868-1912 and early showa. Because this rice grows tall it is harvested late, and most of the crops were damaged by typhoons. The war caused it to fall out of use even further due to crop difficulties and food shortages.

    After learning about this extinct rice, Yamauchi-san, the seventh generation director of the Huchu brewery, started his hunt. His hunt for the rice ended when it was discovered that the Ministry of Agriculture had this strand of rice in criovac storage. From there he returned with fourteen grams of rice and went to the old farmers to help him grow the rice. Eventually, the process was perfected and watari bune sake was born!

    Yuki No Bosha was founded in 1903 by Yataro Saito and is now managed by the fifth generation president, Kotaro Saito. Located in the Akita region, rustic and tranquil with harder water than southern Japan, this sake is lively with bold rich aromas balanced by a crisp, white pepper finish.

    Namazake: Nama is a word you should know! Trust me. Nama is just unpasteurized sake. It must be constantly refrigerated, consumed within a day or two of opening and is only available seasonally. The trade off for all this is that nama is known for it’s fresh, young, bombastic taste!! This sake is currently on its way from Japan, and if it makes it here on time we will soon be tasting this rare sake not normally found in the United States.

    This is a free event, so please pass the word!

    Cheers,
    Henry

  • Other Fish in the Sea

    We seem to be in the midst of sushi mania. Two new restaurants—Seven and Musashi—opened recently, barely a block apart on Hennepin Avenue, which means that downtown Minneapolis now boasts at least a dozen sushi outlets. (The others; Koyi, Nami, Origami, Martini Blu, Wasabi, Ichiban, a sushi counter at Macy’s Marketplace, Zen Box, and two Tensuke Sushi locations.)

    Raw fish is making new inroads into the neighborhoods as well, with Bagu at 48th and Chicago, and Obento-ya at 15th and Como. In St. Paul, the Korean restaurant KumGangSan recently added Sushi World to its name and installed a sushi bar and lunch buffet, following the lead of King’s Korean in Fridley. As the central cities get saturated with raw fish, new outposts of sushi open up in far-flung Woodbury, Maple Grove, Apple Valley, and Edina.

    The tidbits of vinegared rice and seafood are everywhere these days—in supermarket delis, Chinese all-you-can-eat buffets, and even on giant party trays at Costco. But as sushi has made the passage from sophisticated and exotic delicacy to mass-market merchandise, something has gotten lost in translation. Most of the local sushi restaurants have little connection to Japan: The owners of Kikugawa, Musashi, Wasabi, and Mount Fuji (the last in Maple Grove) are Chinese; the owners of Koyi Sushi, Bagu, and Zushiya (the last also in Maple Grove) are Thai; and the sushi chefs themselves are from all over (but rarely from Japan). The food may look and taste the same—indeed, most local sushi restaurants serve the same varieties of fish and seafood, purchased from the same suppliers—but the little rituals that are part of the traditional sushi experience are missing.

    So how do you go beyond the ordinary and find something more interesting, and less generic, than the stuff that’s offered on every sushi menu in town? You ask for it. In Japanese, the word is omakase, which translates roughly as “I am putting myself in your hands” or as we might say here, “chef’s choice.”

    My top choice among the new sushi restaurants is Giapponese Sushi in Woodbury. When I asked for omakase, chef-owner Henry Chan immediately understood my request, and proceeded to serve up a delightful series of courses: raw scallop, Tasmanian salmon, halibut rolled in a thin ribbon of cucumber, a whole small mackerel presented as sashimi, and a roll of tempura shrimp and avocado topped with tuna.

    Chan, who grew up in Wisconsin, recently moved here from Eau Claire, where he owns the town’s only sushi bar, the Shanghai Bistro. He clearly has a passion for sushi, and listening to him, he sounds truly committed to bringing in the best quality and most interesting varieties he can find. The selection is still pretty limited, but he says that as his sales volume grows, he will be adding more varieties. He sends an email to customers when he has something unusual to offer, like houbou (blue fin sea robin) from the Tsujiki fish market in Tokyo; to be added to his mailing list, send him an email at twinscroll@gmail.com.

    I’d also return to Giapponese Sushi to try the Kobe beef steaks—a sixteen-ounce, bone-in New York strip and a fourteen-ounce rib eye are each $55. This isn’t the original Kobe beef from Japan, where the cattle are massaged daily and fed rations of beer, but it’s the same breed, Wagyu, reportedly with a lot more marbling than even USDA Prime. Chan gets his beef from a friend who has a herd of Wagyu near Augusta, Wisconsin. While $55 for a steak sounds pretty steep, compared to what other restaurants charge, it’s a bargain. Locally, Cosmos has imported Japanese Kobe beef on its menu for $17 an ounce (which works out to $272 for a sixteen-ounce steak), and even that’s a steal compared to Craftsteak in Las Vegas. There, you’ll pay $105 for a fourteen-ounce American Wagyu rib eye, $184 for an eight-ounce Australian Wagyu rib eye, and $240 for an 8-ounce Japanese Wagyu steak (yes, that’s $480 a pound).

    Next stop, Musashi in downtown Minneapolis. I asked for omakase, and the sushi chef gave me a puzzled look. “Teppanyaki?” he asked—or something that sounded like that. (They have teppanyaki tables in back.)

    “No,” I said. “Omakase.”

    “We don’t have that.”

    Just then, a second sushi chef, Noua, overheard our conversation and stepped in: “I can do that. How many courses do you want? How much do you want to spend? Four courses? Five?”

    We never did agree on a price, but a series of off-the-menu dishes began to arrive, starting with a pair of martini glasses filled with chunks of raw tuna and salmon with thin slices of cucumber in a soy marinade. At the bottom of each glass was a fake ice cube with a little blinking light that changed colors from blue to green. (Actually, mine was stuck on blue.)

    Round two was four pieces of raw salmon wrapped around spears of fresh mango, partially cooked with a blowtorch, served over leaves of aromatic Japanese chrysanthemum. The decorative centerpiece was another light-cube, flashing red, blue, and green, buried under a pile of shredded daikon. Then came a seafood medley covered in a spicy mayonnaise the color of Thousand Island dressing, dappled with orange flying fish roe. The flashing ice cube made its final appearance in round four, alongside four little rice balls wrapped in eel and white tuna. This was, the sushi chef informed us, “French-style sushi.”

    I have never seen anything like it in France, but the phrase rang a bell. French-style sushi is also how the Chinese chefs at Mt. Fuji in Maple Grove described their neon DayGlo fantasies on the theme of sushi, festooned with red, green, orange, and black flying fish roe.

    “Are you all from China?” I asked the Musashi chefs. “We’re from Asia,” sushi chef No. 3 offered, helpfully. “Not me,” shouted Noua, in perfect English. “I’m from St. Paul.”

    Overall, some of the off-the-menu omakase dishes were pretty good, some of it was just okay, and mostly it was kind of weird. I did see a lot of “normal” sushi come out of the sushi bar while we were dining, and it looked the same as it does everywhere else.

    The most stylish of the new entries in the sushi sweepstakes is Seven, on the second floor of the new r.Norman’s steak house at Seventh and Hennepin. The sushi counter is translucent marble, and white-curtained columns throughout the sushi bar and lounge bathe the otherwise dim space in diffuse colored light that cycles through shades of blue, red, and green—sort of like the fake ice cubes at Musashi, but on a grander scale.

    Seven’s menu offers an impressive selection of sakes and a fairly standard assortment of sushi. I wanted to order omakase, but quickly discovered that omakase is already offered on the menu. We chose the sushi-for-two ($40): the chef’s choice of two specialty rolls and ten pieces of “sushi grade” nigiri sushi.

    Omakase is a chance for a sushi chef to show some imagination and creativity, but this time around what we got was generic versions of the most popular sushi available: a tempura roll, a spicy tuna roll, and two pieces each of shrimp, tuna, salmon, yellowtail, and flounder. Our waitress mostly ignored us, as did our sushi chef.

    Last stop: Obento-ya Japanese Bistro, a little storefront with a low-budget décor that suggests the minimalist aesthetic of Japanese interior design. The owners are a young American-born husband and his Japanese-born wife, and the place just feels more Japanese than most of the glitzier places around town. I splurged and ordered the most expensive item on the menu, the deluxe sushi bento ($12.95), which included six pieces of nigiri sushi and a California roll, plus green salad, Japanese potato salad, sautéed burdock, little wedges of Japanese omelet, and miso soup.

    The sushi turned out to be pretty standard, but the rest of the menu is more impressive. First of all, it’s really cheap—most of the basic ben
    to boxes are under $8, and udon and soba noodle soups are $4.95-$6.50. Second, there are a variety of traditional Japanese dishes that you can’t find at most of the other places—not just the variety of bento boxes and the noodle soups, but also a big selection of robata—skewers of meat, fish, or seafood, grilled or deep-fried ($1.50-$4.50 à la carte). The only thing that was missing was wine, beer, or sake, but I am told that should be fixed by the time this story is published.

    Giapponese Sushi, 10060 Citywalk Drive, Woodbury; 651-578-7777;
    www.giapponesesushi.com

    Musashi, 533 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-332-8772
    Seven Sushi Ultralounge, 700 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-238-7777; www.7mpls.com

    Obento-ya Japanese Bistro, 1510 Como Ave. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-331-1432;
    www.obento-ya.com

  • Sushi: The Naked Truth, part one!

    It seems that not even ten years ago sushi was hardly known, or worse in smaller communities it was known as "bait." And if you asked someone if they liked sushi or if they had eaten sushi, the typical response was, "What suesheee??? Nahhh, we don’t eat our bait!"

    Now if you look around today sushi is everywhere! Spreading like a wildfire, sushi restaurants are popping up in every community. Grocery stores are jumping on the band wagon, and even American restaurants are being influenced with a bit of sashimi or tuna tar tar, etc.

    Like anything else that gets popular with rapid growth, the core is often forgotten, lost, overseen, or simply ignored.

    Spicy tuna: Spicy tuna came to be because when a tuna loin is cut down you will only get about an inch or so of good meat left before the skin because the amount of fascia (white connective tissue) is too chewy for it to be used for nigiri, sashimi, or even a roll.

    Because it is good meat, and sometimes even great if it’s fatty, and it’s toro, we take a spoon and scrape the meat to separate it from the fascia. The end product looks like ground beef and is then made into spicy tuna.

    I’ve had a few customers complain that our spicy tuna is too soft or mushy. Well, that’s because it’s not frozen chunked tuna; this is the real deal!!

    On that note, if you go to a sushi bar and see spicy hamachi, spicy scallops, spicy this or that, it’s not good because they are not turning the fish and as its starts to stink it’s masked with spices and sold, when it should be tossed.

    Cheers,

    Henry C,
    Giapponese