Poke is here to stay
Hawaiian-inspired fish and rice bowls are sweeping Atlanta
One Sunday this past July, my old roommate hit me up to try these weird things called poke bowls and “sushirritos.” What is a poke? Why would you put raw fish in a tortilla? I had many questions. But as we approached the lengthy line outside Irwin Street Market, I realized I was late to the game. Appa’s had been satisfying Atlanta’s poke fix for weeks.
Poke (pronounced poh-kay) is a Hawaiian dish traditionally composed of cool, raw, oil-coated fish — think salmon, ahi tuna, and other sushi staples — served atop a bed of warm rice and dressed with sauce, scallions, and sesame seeds. The word poke means “to slice or cut crosswise into pieces” in Hawaiian and harkens back to a centuries-old snacking practice. Hawaiian fishermen would dice up their daily catches raw, season them with whatever they had on hand, and chow down.
The version of poke currently trending across America's mainland includes the necessary components of raw fish and rice but a more varied mix of toppings, including cucumber, avocado, seaweed, masago, crabmeat, and pickled ginger. Wasabi, soy, and spicy mayo are popular dressings. Sushirritos are simply poke bowls rolled into a seaweed nori sheet (not a tortilla, for the record).
Atlanta’s poke invasion began on June 12, when Justin and Judy Oh opened their pop-up in Old Fourth Ward. Appa’s, Korean for “dad’s,” is an homage to Judy’s sushi chef father and began when the Ohs started making poke bowls and sushirritos for friends. Those friends would share photos of their unfamiliar but aesthetically pleasing meals on Instagram, and soon the Ohs found themselves with an unofficial waiting list of friends and relatives wanting to try their poke. “That’s what gave us the encouragement and inspiration to graduate it into an actual, full-blown pop-up,” says Justin.
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Since Appa’s ended its inaugural run at the end of July, Atlanta has welcomed four brick-and-mortar poke concepts: Fish Bowl Poke, Sushi Burri, Boruboru, and Poke Bar. All but Poke Bar are grown and operated locally.
Mylinh Cao opened Fish Bowl Poke on Broad Street Sept. 1. A seven-year veteran of the industry, Cao introduced Vietnamese cuisine to Downtown with Dua in 2008. Fish Bowl now sits just a few doors down in the space formerly occupied by Dua 2 Go. “People are embracing it a lot quicker than Dua,” Cao says, and indeed the shop seems busier each day, crammed with local office workers (read: hungry CL staffers) and Georgia State students. Poke bowls are the only thing on the menu, and customers fill out paper slips to determine which fish and toppings they desire.
“When you just think about the things that are trending now, these foods that are between fine dining and fast-casual fit the Atlanta lifestyle,” says Justin, adding that Atlanta’s appreciation of high-end sushi has left people wanting something more low-key. “You’re not going to go to Umi every day. You’re not going to O-Ku every day. We wanted to offer something that was a little more casual, a little more approachable.”
Keith “Seven” Chan and his business partner, Ken Yu, ventured into poke almost on a whim after they met at real estate school just months ago. Pairing Yu’s sushi experience with Chan’s food consulting and marketing experience, they opened Sushi Burri in EAV’s Global Grub Collective in October. The pair began dishing out their Japanese-inspired poke just three weeks after meeting with the Collective’s founder, Q Trinh.
Of course, the rules of freshness and quality are different when working with raw fish, which must be purchased from sushi-grade suppliers. Using frozen fish would be disgraceful. To ensure the fish is at peak freshness everyday, Cao and Chan order their supply almost daily. “One of our limitations is that we’re really small. So every single day, we pretty much prepare everything on that day, from the veggies to the sauces to the fish,” says Chan. If there’s fish left over at the end of the day, he and Yu share it with others in the food hall.
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Fish Bowl has plenty of storage space, but Cao doesn’t hang onto fish for more than one day after it’s purchased. She stresses the importance of keeping fish between 32 and 35 degrees to maintain quality. “In all honesty, when a lot of my customers from Dua find out that we are the same owners, they already trust us,” she says. “They know that quality control is very important to us.”
My friend and I weren’t fortunate enough to try Appa’s on that hot summer day (they tragically ran out moments before we reached the front of the line), but Oh says he and his wife will be back again — and hopefully soon. He suggests we think of the project like a popular TV show after a season finale.
“That's kind of where we are now. We're writing the script for the next season,” he says. “We've kept ourselves busy brainstorming, thinking about the various different plot lines we can weave into our larger narrative.”
Where to get your poke fix now
Downtown: Fish Bowl Poke. 61 Broad St. N.W. www.fishbowlpokeshop.com.
East Atlanta Village: Sushi Burri. 477 Flat Shoals Ave. S.E. www.facebook.com/GlobalGrubCollective.
Druid Hills: BoruBoru. Emory Point, 1568 Avenue Place, Suite. 160. 404-458-5518. www.facebook.com/pg/boruborusushi.
Sandy Springs: Poke Bar. 6615 Roswell Road, Suite. 340, Sandy Springs. 404-343-0424. www.ilovepokebar.com.