Poke House

Critic's Review

I needed garlic so Winn-Dixie was on my itinerary. Why not pick up some "Poke".

Poke is the latest "restaurant" scheme; aimed at Milennials who'll pay a lot of money if you can convince them that they're eating something "healthy". Raw fish was edgy in the 80; now it's just a way to get $10 for a couple of slices of tuna.

It was about 3pm when I walked in, so there were just a couple of customers. They have a bingo card in the front where you check off what you want; they apparently aren't interesting is customers over 40yo because most will need reading glasses to read the tiny fonts. Tiny fonts are an indication that there are too many choices also.

There's no clear flow; The register is at the end of the line so I handed the sheet directly to the bowl assembly person.

Poke House Interior

"Small bowl, no extras" I said. The cashier dude told me the price and I initially questioned it. The original menu they put up had the small bowl at $9.95 but they raised it to $10.95 already. Great start.

They have some seating; You can definitely eat in here.

Poke House Seating

When my food was ready, I grabbed the bag and out the door.

When I got home I opened it up.

Poke House Bowl

Not exactly a work of art.

Good take out containers; no chance of this spilling on the way home. Not a lot of tuna. I was surprised by the whole macadamia nuts; they call it "crunch"; I expected them to be crushed.

I decided to weigh it out.

Poke House Tuna

Less than 4 oz of Tuna in a small Poke Bowl.

Underneath the stuff was a large bed of black rice. I'd asked for the dressing on the side so I could taste it separately. Soy and sesame oil. Very "chefy" stuff.

All in all, not a bad bowl of stuff. They did an amateurish job of cutting up the tuna. The pieces weren't close to uniform; there was a big blob and tiny little pieces. They were also chintzy with the extras. A big load of rice and tiny slivers of cucumber and so little red onion I barely could tell it was in the salad.

Conclusion

I laughed heartily when I read on the kiddie blogger site that they call this "chef driven poke". There's nothing here that requires culinary skills, and it's clear that they don't even have basic knife skills. This place is basically a salad bar that forces you to buy 'protein', and the protein is raw fish. Unlike salad bars, where the salad is the main event, I don't really want a bowl of tuna where the tuna is just an add-on for the rice. I want the "poke" to dominate. The bowl that I got was dominated by the rice.