Medicine

[Guest guest]

http://commongroundmag.com/2006/10/food_medicine0610.html

 

Medicine Eat Station Makes it Worth the Wait

Vegetarian Shojin Cuisine Emigrates from Japan to SF, It Only Took 500 Years

By Andrea Blum

Serving a type of food usually reserved for Zen Buddhist monks, Medicine Eat

Station is one of a kind. At least in the United States. According to my

waitress who served our meal with encyclopedic grace and patience, there’s

only one other purely shojin restaurant in the world, in Tokyo (and called

Genshinkio).

 

As its name suggests, Medicine follows the shojin principles of good health and

harmony. Not only is the food seasonal, local, organic and biodynamic, it’s

part of a convergence of taste, texture, composition and flow, including the

microbrew beer, wine and sake.

 

Medicine materialized in the hardly monastic Crocker Galleria, with its lingerie

boutiques and high-end jewelry stores, one year ago when restaurateur William

Petty opened its doors, or rather, its elevator, in a hidden top corner of the

mall in downtown San Francisco.

 

Shojin ryori (shojin cooking) is a 500-year-old vegetarian style developed in

Zen temples to help facilitate the meditation practice of the monks, who

consider fresh seasonal food a path to good health and a clear mind. Since the

9th century, when Buddhism arrived in Japan, the monks’ simple cooking merged

with the more refined, intricate, multi-course tea ceremony known as kaiseki.

 

Ryuta Sakamoto, Medicine’s 33-year-old co-executive chef, was wooed to San

Francisco from his family restaurant in Kyoto, where some Japanese chefs train

at Zen temples and use the teachings in their own restaurants. Restaurateur

Petty became enamored with temple cuisine surrounding Kyoto during his

eight-year stay in Japan, and decided to bring it to San Francisco.

 

LUNCH

 

The lunch menu comes in sets, with sides of special appetizers, soups and

salads. Try the Ten Don set: a kabocha squash, a wild mushroom, a sweet potato,

a roasted rouge pepper and a ball of sweet corn encased in tempura batter and

fried perfectly in rice bran oil. It’s then diligently piled atop a rose

colored nine-grain rice including purple-y forbidden rice. The meal comes with a

cool soup composed of two green beans, a dash of sour plum and an invisible

gelatin which coats a tiny leaf called junsai. The small slippery shoot tended

to escape my wooden spoon as if it didn’t want to be eaten. I later found out

that this plant grows naturally in fresh water ponds and the coating is there

for its protection. The trio of color floated in a clear infused stock of kombo

seaweed, roasted soybeans, and shitake mushrooms. Light and quenching, the soup

was unlike any I had ever tasted (or seen). An organic and fresh tofu wedge

handmade by the Hodo Soy Beanery sprinkled with kelp accompanies the meal,

making it a balanced tasty feast ($11.5).

 

A couple sitting next to me at the long communal table said that they’ve eaten

at Medicine an astounding five times while on visits to San Francisco from

Hawaii, where they themselves own ten restaurants. “It’s not gimmicky,â€

they told me. “It’s clean and inspirational.â€

 

During the day, I saw businessmen with their ties swung over their shoulders,

groups of women with heavy shopping bags and ad folk dressed in the latest hip

fashions. The huge plate-glass windows overlooking Sutter Street illuminates the

clean space with reflective light. Devoid of decoration, notwithstanding a vase

and a fern, the restaurant shines simply by the color and presentation of the

food.

 

DINNER

 

At night, candles are added and the menu completely changes. And if concern for

parking holds any sway over visiting this location otherwise barren of

restaurants; at night the parking is relatively open.

 

The evening menu celebrates the kaiseki tradition—a six-course meal (90

minutes) and the other nine-course (120 minutes), with additional a la carte

sets similar to lunch. Each set meal on the menu is labeled either broiled, raw,

fried, steamed or simmered (the fives ways of shojin, they say). Shojin cooks,

my diligent waitress told me, must have ten years experience before they’re

allowed to simmer. And at Medicine, each vegetable is cooked separately, so not

to spoil the essence of each flavor or color. “We only utilize traditional

shojin cooking methods that require the least manipulation to the food

product,†says Bryan Waites, the executive chef.

 

I tried the “steamed†($21). The piping dish was served in a multi-tiered

teapot, sparsely populated with handmade seitan, wild mushrooms and a ponzu

sauce. A foraged purslane salad (picked by the chef and his assistant at 4am in

Bolinas) balanced the plate. I started with an amazing corn soup with a

submerged dumpling made from edamame and mochi flour and a touch of uma. From

somewhere there was a wasabi kick.

 

I ended with a sweet coconut cup dessert peppered with crunchy buckwheat seeds.

A group of unidentifiable textures floated inside, one was a mushroom. My friend

couldn’t stomach the thought, so I ate hers.

 

Medicine is doing so well that Petty says they’re considering opening up

another location.

 

In the evenings, Medicine is accessed by a private elevator at 161 Sutter Street

(between Kearny and Montgomery). During lunch hours, take the escalators to the

top floor inside the Galleria.

 

 

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances,

there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in

such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest

we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

William O. Douglas