The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Gastronomic Highlights of 2008:

Who says sushi has to be raw fish?? The actual meaning of the word sushi means vinegared rice, so anything with vinegared rice is sushi.

As a chef my job is to provide the best products and cater to all tastes and pallets, and one that has always stuck in the back of my mind is vegetarians and vegans. So its time to put the thinking cap on.

In the next few weeks my team and I will be creating a sushi menu for vegans and vegetarians here is a teaser.

There are three types of Maguro that you will encounter at the sushi bar: Yellow Fin Tuna, Big Eye Tuna, and Blue Fin Tuna. While all three appear similar with their reddish hue, there is a world of difference among them.

If you have ever wondered how the fish in the display case starts out here ya go!

This is suzuki (new 30cc model)
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v199/Bistro2930/Picture011-2.jpg

japanese fish scaler
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v199/Bistro2930/Picture012-2.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v199/Bistro2930/Picture013-3.jpg
After scaling cut behind the head and through the spine then repeat on other side
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v199/Bistro2930/Picture014-3.jpg

Start at the rear end and slit tward the head.

The menu at the new Red Pepper in Saint Paul combines Vietnamese, Thai and Hmong dishes, but since the first two cuisines are pretty widely available elsewhere, I decided to try one of the Hmong dishes. Number 27, sweet pork belly with eggs, turned out to be a savory stew with big chunks of roast pork, (not nearly as fatty as I had feared), hard-boiled eggs, red bell pepper, fresh pineapple green onions and ginger, in a rich brown slightly sweet gravy accented with star anise (I think), served with steamed rice. Delicious, and served in very generous portion.

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.

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!"

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:

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.

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: