After stints in Vail, San Francisco and Miami, chef and native St. Louisan Eliott Harris is back in town and has taken over the sushi bar at Clayton’s Miso on Meramec. He’s brought his deft touch and commitment to freshness to a restaurant that, in the past, has been known more for its nightlife than the quality of its food. Owner Brad Beracha recruited Harris deliberately to elevate Miso’s offerings, and the resulting menu of sushi and Pan-Asian dishes is making Miso stand out in a metro area crowded with sushi restaurants.
Did you just happen into making sushi or was it a deliberate choice? I always wanted to get behind a sushi bar. This was about a year after culinary school, so I worked the line for five, six years, was a sous chef in Vail and always wanted to get my foot in the door if it was possible. The Japanese chef’s name was Ted Minami. He taught me how to make rice; … that was my main function. After about two months, he let me start making rolls. I wasn’t allowed to cut it. … If there were one or two extra grains of rice, he’d pick it off and … flick it at me. It was hard to handle. I kept my mouth shut and just did what I was told.
Why do you have to be trained to make rice? That’s the building block to sushi. There is a lot of continuity as far as how to make shari-su. “Shari” is rice; “su” is vinegar. One, it flavors the rice, and two, it adds a nice sheen. The biggest component is rice vinegar – … it’s a seasoned, aged, better-quality vinegar. Added to that is a lot of sugar, almost half the volume of the rice vinegar is sugar. There’s a little bit of salt, a little bit of mirin and then kombu, which is a dried seaweed. There’s a big wood bowl that you use to cut the rice, … [which] slowly incorporates the vinegar and breaks up the rice into individual grains.
When you go to a sushi bar, what do you order that will indicate the level of overall quality? Definitely the tuna. The Japanese say there’s two things you always look for: tuna and tamago. Tamago is a Japanese egg omelet. There’s a special copper pan that’s square that you only use to make tamago. Every chef has their own recipe. It starts off as a paper-thin sheet and then you fold it and pour more egg and fold it and fold it and fold it so when you cut it, you can see all the layers. There’s sugar, there’s sake, there’s mirin, soy, a little dashi. That’s something that took years to perfect because you have one bad flip, and it’s done.
Go over sushi etiquette with me. What people don’t know is that sushi is a finger food. Hashi, which are chopsticks, are more for transferring. If you have a communal plate, pick a few pieces [with your chopsticks] but use your hands [to eat them]. And the dipping in soy, you always want to dip the fish side down, and the fish should hit your tongue first as opposed to the rice. With sushi rice, once any liquid comes in contact with it, it just kind of falls apart. When you make a rice ball for nigiri, you want to have a small air pocket so it’s nice and delicate.
Talk about the Japanese approach to sushi versus the American approach. The American approach is heavy-handed – more is better as opposed to less is more. I’m definitely a less-is-more type of person. … When I lived in San Francisco, the owner of the restaurant was Japanese. He’d have friends that would fly in from Japan and they’d come straight to the restaurant and he’d put ’em in front of me, the only non-Japanese guy, and all they wanted to eat were rolls because you can’t get that in Japan.
You’ve revamped Miso’s menu, adding a section of rolls that are modern and creative. The Papasan roll was inspired when I was at Tokyo Go Go [in San Francisco]. The chef said, “Listen, we have a lot of striped bass and I need you to figure out how to get rid of it all.” We’re in the Mission District, so I figured I’d add a bit of a Latin influence. I took snow crab mix, spiced it up a little bit, did a chiffonade of shiso leaf, sliced the suzuki (striped bass) paper thin, draped that over the top with jalapeño. We’d put it on a sizzle plate and put it in the salamander to caramelize everything. … Two weeks later, it was on the menu. … It’s definitely a high-maintenance roll, and people probably curse my name … in San Francisco every time they have to make it.
What about in Miami, what influences did you pick up there? We have the Tropical. It’s tempura shrimp and mango and cucumber, and it’s coated with toasted coconut. A Floribbean roll.
And you cure some fish in-house? This is saba. I get a whole mackerel from Norway, fillet it, cure it.
You could get this fully cured, Cryovaced, done. Yeah. [But] it’s just one of those things that I enjoy doing – an old-school Japanese method. First, you take the fillet, and then you salt it for about 45 minutes. The salt extracts a lot of the moisture out of the fish and makes the flavor less strong. From there we [soak] it in a vinegar solution for another 45 minutes. That kind of tightens it up and pickles it, almost like a pickled herring. But [it’s] a really light cure, so it doesn’t cure it all the way through. Saba is an oily fish. I wouldn’t recommend it to a novice. It’s more in the advanced category.
Making good sushi seems simple, but it’s quite complicated. When I first started, I didn’t know what I was doing and it was constantly in my ear, “less rice, less rice.” It’s all about training your hands. It’s not like cutting 7-ounce fillets all day long or butchering a salmon. A lot of these fish are really delicate. You have flat fish, you have round fish, and there’s different techniques. I feel really lucky that I was trained under Japanese chefs that wanted to pass along their trade to a round-eye.
Miso on Meramec
16 N. Meramec Ave., Clayton
314.863.7888
This article appears in Jul 1-31, 2009.