That is just what Tataki Sushi & Sake Bar in San Francisco is believed to be.

The tiny, seven-month-old restaurant serves only seafood that isn’t overfished, farmed without proper management, or contains high levels of mercury and other contaminants.

Find out more about why business partners, Chef Kin Lui, Chef Raymond Ho, and Casson Trenor (a sustainable fisheries expert) decided to open such a restaurant by reading my story today in the San Francisco Chronicle Food section.

Tataki, the site of a former Subway sandwich shop, grabs your attention right when you walk in. A Monterey Bay Aquarium “Seafood Watch” pocket guide, which lists best and worst sustainable seafood species, is front and center on every table. A copy is also tucked into every take-out menu.

Oct. 22, Tataki will be the site of the official launch of three new, ground-breaking sustainable sushi guides created in partnership with the aquarium, Blue Ocean Institute, and Environmental Defense Fund. Each will include information on as many as 60 different seafood species commonly found on sushi menus.

Want to do the right thing? Then, you’ll stop eating unagi, bluefin toro, hamachi, octopus (tako), monkfish liver (ankimo), farmed salmon (sake), imported King crab (kani), imported albacore tuna (shiro maguro), and sea urchin (uni) from Maine — all of which are unsustainable, according to the aquarium’s new guide.

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As a kid growing up in San Francisco, I happily remember elementary school field trips and teen-age outings to the magical Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.

I recall sitting back in pitch darkness and watching the stars overhead in the Morrison Planetarium, thinking this was the absolute coolest place on Earth. I remember staring at the antelope and cheetah on display in the natural history museum. I remember how I couldn’t take my eyes off the ancient manatee in the Steinhart Aquarium, even if he hardly moved much.

And I remember listlessly eating burgers and fries in the museum cafe that had been left under heat-lamps for god knows how long.

Well, Dorothy, we’re not in that Academy of Sciences any more. Welcome to the revamped, utterly dazzling new California Academy of Sciences that will finally open its doors on Saturday. I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview on Monday night.

The original 1953 museum was the first scientific institution in the West. After being damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, it was closed. After a $488 million renovation and expansion, the new institution is now the only one in the world to house an aquarium, planetarium, natural history museum, and world-class research and education program under one roof.

It was redesigned by Pulitzer-Prize winner Renzo Piano, who also created the Pompidou Center in Paris. Like that fanciful French center, the academy boasts an extensive use of glass, giving it a modern, airy, and organic feel. Designed to be the greenest museum in the world, it is expected to earn a “platinum” rating (the highest possible) by the U.S. Green Building Council.

There is a “living roof” planted with native species, which is expected to reduce storm water runoff by up to 3.6 million gallons of water annually. A glass canopy with 60,000 photo voltaic cells will capture sunlight and is expected to produce up to 10 percent of the building’s needs. Additionally, building walls are insulated with old denim jeans.

The food also has gotten a much needed update, and how. San Francisco culinary legends, Charles Phan (chef-owner of the Slanted Door) and Loretta Keller (chef-owner of Coco500) have partnered to create the casual food-court-like Academy Cafe, and the full-service Moss Room. All the food served will be local, seasonal, and sustainable.

The cafe is arranged into stations such as “Slow Cooked,” “Steamed,” and “Sizzle.” Think soft tacos filled with juicy, slow-cooked pork; Vietnamese spring rolls; steamed chicken buns; tamales; fish & chips; green papaya salad; and vegetarian paninis.

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This lunch bag is not only cute, but made of certified organic cotton that’s easily washable. It also was designed by a self-professed “industrial designer and Silicon Valley dropout.”

Susanne Maddux of San Francisco was the first woman on Apple computer’s elite international design team. She later started her own design consultancy business, where she helped design products for such companies as Sony, Nike, and Kuhn Rikon.

About two years ago, after losing her father and step-father to cancer, and giving birth to her second child prematurely, Maddux’s focus shifted, after she painfully realized how fragile life could be. She rededicated herself to designing things that would be socially and ecologically responsible. The result was her company, Hero Bags, which manufactures totes in the United States using sustainable materials.

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Representatives of Dagoba Organic Chocolate of Oregon will be handing out free chocolate bars and herb seedlings in six locations in San Francisco and Berkeley, today through Sept. 13.

The catch? You can find out the general locations and the dates, but not the exact times the freebies will be handed out. Dagoba says it’s a stealth, guerrilla-type operation to maintain the sense of surprise. (Uhh, I’m sure that makes sense in some universe.)

Be on the lookout in Justin Herman Plaza and Union Square in San Francisco today; the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco on Sept. 6; Golden Gate Park in San Francisco on Sept. 7; the University of California at Berkeley campus on Sept. 7; and the Berkeley Farmers’ Market (Center Street at Martin Luther King Jr. Way) on Sept. 13.

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If you missed this weekend’s Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco, you’ll still be able to enjoy a part of it on the Web in the near future.

Cooking demos in the ”Green Kitchen” were filmed and will be posted on YouTube at a future date. I got a chance to sit in on two of the demos, the first featured Alice Waters of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse making vinaigrette with her 25-year-old daughter, Fanny Singer, who was on break from grad school. The second featured maverick New York chef David Chang, who created his take on caprese salad, in which he substituted tofu for mozzarella, and shiso for basil.

Alice Waters has long been associated with salad, having almost single-handedly popularized mesclun mix in the United States. Fanny said her mother’s salad was probably the first food she ate in puree form when she was a baby.

“Salad is my favorite thing to cook,” Fanny said. “When I say that, my friends all say that there’s not much cooking to that. But there is a lot involved in making a good salad.” It starts with carefully washed leaves that have been dried completely so that the dressing will adhere to it better and the greens will be crisper. Then, there’s the vinaigrette, which Waters says, should not shock you with its tartness, but give you a pleasant brightness.

Such care is taken with her salads that Waters said it used to take one person eight hours to wash and dry all the salad leaves when Chez Panisse first opened.

Decades ago, when Playboy magazine named Chez Panisse the seventh best restaurant in the country, Waters flew to New York for the big gala event. She decided to make salad as her dish. She picked all the lettuces from the garden at the last possible moment, carrying them on the plane still covered in dirt (imagine getting that through security today).

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