Poke Bowls are just Awesome

[Admin]

Believe it or not, poke bowls have nothing to do with Pokemon Go. (trivia time: pokemon is shortened for pocket monster)

Poke bowl is a Hawaiian-Japanese dish. Hawaii is largely influenced by Japanese culture and is famous for items such as spam musubi. Poke bowls are simply diced up protein (generally raw fish) mixed with veggies and sauces on top of a bowl of sushi rice. The toppings can include raw salmon, raw tuna, raw yellow tail, octopus, chicken, beef, seaweed, cucumber, carrots, onions, sesame, sprouts, etc. Poke bowls are often served in restaurants with a made to order set up. Just like Subway and Chipotle, customers select ingredients they desire while a server combines the ingredients to create the bowl. There are also restaurants that sell poke bowls as menu items that is only altered on demand.

The trend of poke bowls have really taken off for the past couple of years. Larger shops are buzzing in the cities while small shops have dotted the suburbs of Southern California. Aside from maintaining freshness of the fish, set up of a poke shop is relatively easy and labor is not intensive. No wonder it's doing so well.

As a fan of raw fish, I am thankful for poke bowls' popularity.

Have you tried a poke bowl before? Where did you find the dish and how did you like it?