Hawai‘i is the only place that gets poke right (so maybe don’t bother with that new fast-casual poke spot that just opened up near your work)
As a kid, the version I saw most often at the family table was my grandmother’s tako poke, probably because sliced octopus was cheaper than tuna and kept longer in the fridge.problem? Put simply, much of the poke served by mainland purveyors is, as any local would put it,. Poke isn’t a name you just slap on any dish with cubed raw fish and a whiff of balmy orientalism.
I’ve had so-so poke in Los Angeles, served by a guy who didn’t pretend to understand the culture he’d jacked. I didn’t have the heart to conduct a proper journalistic sampling of spots in New York City, but I did pay a recent visit, with as much hopeful excitement as I could muster, to a place called POKEE on West Third Street in the Village. This fast-casual counter shop, listed at No.
I ordered yellowfin tuna over white rice, with the dressing they call “Hawaii Tradition” — some kind of sweet soy-ginger glaze, better suited to a Chicken McNugget — and a garnish of hijiki seaweed, daikon radish and diced cucumber. The ahi came in a hue of millennial pink, looking less like the uncooked flesh of a yellowfin than like one of my kids’ Duplo Lego blocks. The mouthfeel was odd: I noticed a crunch, as if biting down onto cartilage.
But it’s worth noting that at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday, POKEE was packed. Maybe it was the healthful halo that a bowl of bright-pink tuna and veggies can confer. Maybe it was just the power of suggestion — all those trend pieces talking about how you can’t miss the latest Hawaiian export. Or maybe the people queuing up simply didn’t know any better, and even rancid poke holds some weird appeal.
In search of redemption, I visited the Midtown East outpost of Sweetcatch, another popular poke chain, but one with the foresight to hire a consulting chef who lives in Hawaii, Lee Anne Wong, whom I know both from her combative stint on
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