Some Like It Raw
January 23, 2004
Minami
1900 Clement St. at 20th Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94121
415-387-5913
Hours: Tue.-Sat.: 5 p.m.-10 p.m.; Sun.: 5 p.m.-9:30 p.m.
Prices: Sashimi: $2.40-$8; sushi (nigiri): $2.30-$4.15; rolls: $3.50-$9.50; entrees: $8.75-$13.95
Credit cards accepted.
Food: Fair
Ambience: Fair
Service: Good
It’s the New Year and most people have diet and exercise on the top of their list of resolutions. Whether the goal is to lose weight, lower cholesterol or adapt a healthier and smarter lifestyle, gym memberships have gone up and diet books have been flying off the shelves.
Everywhere you turn, diet books and diet fads promise weight loss (of up to 12 pounds in two weeks!). But unless you’re a contestant on Survivor, these fads are impractical, dangerous and unhealthy. There’s the no-carb-all-protein and high-fat diet, the no veggie/fruit diet, sugar busters diet, raw food diet.
Keep in mind that each person’s body is different, which means everyone metabolizes food and responds to exercises differently. I’ve always believed in eating well-balanced and healthy meals and being active for at least 45 minutes, five days a week. All the aforementioned diets have some good in them, for instance, limiting simple carbohydrates or cutting down on sugar intake, but I don’t think I can cut off fruits and vegetables or whole grains from my diet — this is the stuff that makes your skin glow, hair shiny and body toned and un-bloated.
The no-carb diet has been the most popular fad for the past several years or so, but one diet, which has been around forever, has been slowly making its way up the popularity ladder. The raw and living food diet, is vegan and, well, raw. You can’t eat anything that’s been cooked, blanched, steamed or baked. I see this sort of like a fancy and expensive version of being lost in the wilderness with no matches.
Raw and living foods contain enzymes, which are lost during the cooking process. Enzymes begin to degrade at 106 degrees Fahrenheit, and at 116 degrees, all food enzymes are destroyed. If you choose to follow this strict diet, you prepare foods by sprouting seeds, grains and beans; soaking nuts and dried fruits; and juicing fruits and vegetables. You can only “cook” food using a dehydrator. Raw foodists think enzymes digest food completely, and that the cooking process kills vitamins and minerals and takes longer to digest.
Seeing as how I’m not yet ready to take the plunge into soaked seeds and mashed dates with carob powder, I decided to have sashimi last Friday. It’s not vegan, but it’s raw fish, does that count? I went to Minami in the Richmond District after my friend told me that their uni (sea urchin roe) and ama ebi (sweet shrimp) were really good.
Located on the corner of Clement Street and 20th Avenue, Minami is a tiny restaurant with a maximum occupancy of just 25 people. There are five tables in the dining room, which has a black and white checkered floor, and about six chairs at the sushi bar. The restaurant is decorated with paper lanterns, tropical drink umbrellas, Japanese paintings and rice paper screens on the windows.
After circling around several times to find parking, we arrived at Minami and we were lucky to score a small table in the corner. Before our main meal, we snacked on cubed potatoes drizzled with a sweet, teriyaki-style sauce. We started with Seaweed Salad ($2.50), brown and dark and neon green seaweed tossed with sesame oil and vinegar. You can now find this salad at Chinese dim sum restaurants, as well as Japanese restaurants.
Since winter is the season where sea urchins are at its best, we ordered Uni ($3.95/ 2 pieces), which came with yellow-orange urchin roe atop sushi rice, wrapped with nori. The roe was soft but firm, and tasted sweet and slightly acidic. If you’ve never had uni before, it’s an acquired taste and feeling in your mouth.
Urchin roe is California’s biggest commercial fishery export, with sushi being one of its more popular uses. On the outside, these echinoderms have short and long spines, vary in colors from dark purple to red and live in kelp beds off the coast. Once the urchin is exposed, there are five ridged strips of yellow or orange roe, covered with tiny bumps. The roe we eat is actually the male or female gonads, the ovaries or testes. Yum!
The Ama Ebi ($4.60), or sweet shrimp, was butterflied and sprinkled with bright salmon roe. The heads are fried and also served on the black, octagon-shaped platter.
If you can’t decide on what to order, Minami offers sushi and sashimi sampler platters. We had the Sakura ($12.85), which came with soup and 19 pieces of assorted sushi and rolls. More specifically the platter had futomaki (big roll), filled with pickles, egg, cucumber and carrots; California roll, crab, avocado; tekka maki (tuna roll); ebi (shrimp); hamachi (yellow tail); unagi (eel); flying fish roe, aji (mackerel); ika (squid); and tamago (sweet egg omelet).
Minami’s food presentation is beautiful, and the restaurant offers a variety of cooked rolls and vegetarian rolls as well as lunch and dinner entrees. The service is friendly and hospitable and the small dining room makes for a nice setting for a date or a family dinner.
Other than the rice, crab and shrimp, everything we ate for dinner was raw and dead, and other than the fish and egg, everything was vegan. I guess we could have just gnawed on raw nori and called it a meal, but then again, I wouldn’t have been able to eat the urchin reproductive system.
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