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Ame Have Some More Sashimi

Ame, (pronounced ah-may) the second restaurant by operators Hiro Sone and Lissa Doumani, is Californian-style Japanese restaurant inside the St. Regis hotel here in San Francisco. It's decorated in the black-lacquer style pervasive to popular Asian restaurants of this type, though happily the emphasis is on the food as opposed to the scene.

Their strength is sashimi--carb haters can rejoice at their refutation of rice to accompany their raw fish. If you need a little bit of crispy goodness, though, try the tempura "poke" appetizer; it's sashimi wrapped in nori and ever so lightly tempura battered and cooked on the outside. Think of it as the foodie equivalent of a jalapeno popper.

Also impressive is the sake list; they present and sell bottles of cold sake more like regular wine than like the boxed novelty it is at many Japanese restaurants in the U.S. Taisetsu sake, for example, is aged in igloos in Hokkaido. At this rate, sake snobs will be the new wine snobs. A scary thought, indeed.