Sustainable Seafood Selections :: Tataki Sushi & Sake Bar, San Francisco
This fact blows my mind: According to the market research firm NPD Group, 61 billion restaurant meals were served across the US in 2008; 225 million of them included sushi. That figure was an 11% increase from 2007. The problem is that many fish species, such as bluefin toro, hamachi, unagi, octopus and spider rolls containing blue crabs from Asia, are considered to be overfished.
So one restaurant is making a stand in the sand. Tataki Sushi & Sake Bar of San Francisco, with a mere 24 seats in its restaurant, has decided to become the only sustainable sushi bar in North America. Their menu features “sushi without guilt.”
Chef and co-owner Kin Lui and partner and co-chef Raymond Ho are divers and underwater enthusiasts. But they met with FishWise, a Santa Cruz nonprofit group that educates people about sustainability fishery issues, to find out what they could offer in their sushi bar that wasn’t being endangered by overfishing. The Mr. Lui and Mr. Ho were so enamored Casson Trenor of FishWise is now listed on their Website as the restaurant’s “Sustainability Guru.”
The result is fish like arctic char, which has the same rosy-orange hue and rich flavor of salmon, amberjack, albacore tuna, skipjack tuna, almaco jack, yellowfin tuna, and more.
Tataki Sushi & Sake Bar
A: 2815 California Street, San Francisco, CA 94115
T: (415) 931-1182
And for a seafood guide to sustainable sushi, available after October 22, visit:
blueocean.org
edf.org/home.cfm
montereybayaquarium.org