The Rake Magazine

Tag: Woodbury

  • 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!!

     

  • Something Fishy in Woodbury

    I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I drove out to
    Giapponese, the new sushi bar / restaurant in Woodbury. Sushi is everywhere
    these days, including the refrigerator cases of local supermarkets, and since
    the sushi restaurants all tend to get the same ingredients from the same
    suppliers, it has become a pretty generic product. But the name – Italian for
    “Japanese” — was intriguing, and the online menu sounded pretty interesting:
    smoked salmon bruschetta and poki (the Hawaiian version of tuna tartare); and
    some varieties of fish and shellfish that seldom show up on local sushi menus,
    such as kawahagi (file fish, a member of the blowfish family) kinmeidai (golden eye snapper), kohada (gizzard shad) and walu (the Hawaiian name for a variety of escolar, sometimes sold as white tuna.

    When I asked for omakase (chef’s choice), chef-owner Henry
    Chan immediately knew what I wanted, 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.

    Chan clearly has a passion for sushi, and listening to him, he sounds really 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. If you want to be notified when new and interesting varieties of sushi and seafood are available, send him an email at twinscroll@gmail.com. I just got an email yesterday, announcing the arrival of his live tanks (for holding lobster and shrimp), and a shipment of Hamma Hamma oysters from Washington state.

    I’d like to go back sometime to try the Kobe beef steaks – a 16 ounce bone-in New York Strip and a 14 ounce ribeye, both $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. Chan gets his beef from a friend who has a herd of Wagyu near Augusta, Wisconsin. $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 would work out to $272 for a 16-ounce steak), and even that is a bargain compared to Craftsteak in Las Vegas. Craftsteak charges $105 for a 14-ounce American Wagyu ribeye, $184 for an eight-ounce Australian Wagyu ribeye, and $240 for an eight-ounce Japanese Wagyu steak – which works out to $480 a pound.

    Giapponese Sushi
    10060 Citywalk Drive
    Woodbury, MN 55129
    Phone: 651-578-7777