Linda Falkenstein
Try adding some ahi tuna to the Hawaii Green bowl, a combo of brown rice, salmon, edamame and seaweed.
Is there anything left to be said about poke? That is the question.
Isthmus reviewed Madison’s initial Hawaiian raw seafood bowl spot, Miko Poke, on Monroe Street. We reviewed Madison’s second Hawaiian raw seafood bowl spot, Poke Poke, in the Gateway Mall. We reviewed Poke Plus on State Street. Now, faced with reviewing Poke It Up — near campus in a former Erbert and Gerbert’s — I took it as a challenge.
What mainland Americans eat these days is not that close to the traditional version of the Hawaiian raw fish dish called poke, which was basic: raw fish served with sea salt and seaweed. What we have now is more like a deconstructed sushi roll crossed with a salad bar. Add-ons, from fruit to vegetables to little crunchy things, means poke is a bowl of stuff that only sometimes, or sometimes only tangentially, focuses on raw fish. As a concept, it is a fast casual restaurant dream.
The crown on any bowl of poke is its aioli drizzle. (I am waiting for the aioli flourish to become an art form like the foam drawings atop cups of cappuccino.) Aioli makes everything better. I submit that any sandwich with a lot of mayonnaise on it is better than the one with no mayo. And a poke bowl without any aioli, or some sauce, is a very boring pile of food, no matter how good the fish is.
On my first trip to Poke it Up, I built my own bowl from the available ingredients, and despite checking off my preferences on a paper order form, the assembly line left off the soy sauce and the spicy aioli. The result was pretty bland. The only ingredient that had punch was the briny tangle of seaweed salad and delicious, super-sweet strips of tofu. Sad fact, dieters — the aioli that really pulls poke together can add around 200-250 calories (Poke it Up does not provide exact calorie counts for its ingredients, but other poke spots with similar menus do.)
Poke it Up offers several bases — sushi rice, brown rice, both of those options mixed with salad, and just plain salad. I prefer the brown rice to sushi rice, and here the brown rice is cooked to the proper doneness, with just a little bite. The salad greens are mostly iceberg, though I found a couple of kale leaves. It’s not the kind of greens mix that people who are excited about greens are going to get excited about.
What would be cool is if one of Madison’s poke parlors offered more revolutionary bases — like zoodles or kale noodles (koodles?), bamboo rice, forbidden rice, quinoa, kelp noodle slaw or citrus kale salad, all actual options available elsewhere in the U.S. Poke it Up’s innovation is to offer the poke bowl in a sort of burrito shape wrapped with seaweed, like a large unsliced sushi roll. It’s easier to eat it in the bowl.
The most expensive item on the menu is the signature “Ocean Feast” bowl at $15. It’s a generous, dinner-sized portion with all the raw fish options piled on: ahi tuna, salmon, white tuna and yellowtail (it’s worth noting that Poke it Up provides more raw fish options than is usual), augmented with mango, fried onion, nori, ginger, tobiko (little beads of fish roe), spicy aioli and wasabi sauce.
The fish was uniformly tender; salmon had the most flavor. I love the mango — it complements the texture and the flavors of the raw fish. As with the other bowls I tried at Poke it Up, the crunchy elements like fried onion were barely in evidence. That’s important, for they too make a nice contrast to the texture of the fish. Even so, this is the bowl most likely to make a believer out of a poke skeptic.
The Hawaii Green, with brown rice, salmon, plentiful edamame, and seaweed, is another good choice, although again this bowl needs more crunch. It, like the Ocean Feast, is topped with spicy aioli, which is not very spicy. The wasabi aioli, on the other hand, has an almost overwhelming horseradish kick.
Build-your-own bowls start at $8.50 for small (one scoop of fish); this makes a nice lunch size.
With poke proliferating, and generally high in quality so far across the board, it’s going to be the novelty of different ingredients that will distinguish the restaurants. Poke it Up is doing a lot of things right, but it’s hard to tell it apart from the rest of the poke pack.
Poke it Up
540 University Ave.; 608-709-5511; pokeitupmadison.com;
11 am-10 pm daily; $8-$15; Step to door.
