The poke bowl: Whose came first?

In the future, all claims of food origin will be settled via social media. With chefs and thousands of diners snapping pics of their creations/meals every day on Instagram, coupled with aggregation, it will be much easier for future historians to find first mentions of a specific dish.

But there is one claim that predates the rise of social media. It’s amazing because this little bit of Hawaii food history happened within a decade or so, and few of us noticed. That is, when did the first commercial poke bowl appear?

Bragging Rights

When it comes to works of literature or music, authorship can be proved by copyrights, but taking credit for food creations is more difficult.

England’s 18th-century fourth Earl of Sandwich is credited for inventing the sandwich when, during a card game, he became hungry but didn’t want to stop playing. As the story goes, he sent a servant to fetch bread and slices of roast beef, thus forever becoming immortalized in the lexicon of food we can’t live without.

But who’s to say some anonymous shepherd didn’t do the same with some slices of lamb when hunger arose in the field? The only difference: No historian was there to document the event.

As marketing became more prevalent, it became more important to establish first-server status as a matter of having proper bragging rights.

Depending on who you believe, the Caesar salad was the creation of Caesar Cardini during a busy Fourth of July, 1924, in his Tijuana, Mexico, restaurant. Or it may have been created by his partner, Paul Maggiora, in 1927. Then there’s an employee, Livio Santini, who claimed he made his mother’s salad in Caesar’s kitchen in 1925, and that Caesar took the recipe.

Locally, the most high-profile battle for credit took place over the mai tai, which was either the creation of Don the Beachcomber (Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt) in 1933, Trader Vic (Victor Bergeron) in 1944 or music man Harry Owens in 1954.

Honolulu Advertiser three-dot columnist Eddie Sherman questioned the origin of the mai tai in 1970, causing Bergeron to quip, “Anyone who says I didn’t create this drink is a dirty stinker.”

The Original Poke Bowl?

During a recent Ward Dine Around restaurant event, one of the stops was the newest Pa‘ina Cafe, specializing in poke bowls, salads, sandwiches and gelato, where co-owner Derek Uyehara hit me with the tantalizing bit of information that he and his partners had come up with the poke bowl name in 2008 when they opened Pa‘ina Cafe’s predecessor, The Poke Bowl, at the Ward Farmer’s Market.

I never paid much attention to Pa‘ina Cafe’s catchphrase, “Home of the Original Poke Bowl,” because a lot of cred inflation goes on in these days of excess branding. The photographic proof predates Instagram, which launched in 2010.

I’ve been writing about food for a quarter-century, and I believed the ubiquitous poke bowl was something that has always been around. After all, what could be easier than scooping poke over rice? But as I thought more about it, fish is generally considered one of the most expensive items on a plate, and therefore poke was often a dish served on the side in a small portion on Hawaiian plates, on buffet lines or sold by the pound at fish markets and grocery stores, to pick on like pupu, or throw over rice yourself at home.

But I never ate poke bowls until Pa‘ina Cafe made it easy to pick one up as a quick, inexpensive lunch.

One reason commercial establishments didn’t put two and two together is because the hot rice would cook the fish, which defeated the purpose of ordering the raw seasoned fish. Cooking poke wasn’t done commercially until poke don Sam Choy introduced us to “Sam’s original fried poke.” I wrote about it in 1997 when he opened Sam Choy’s Breakfast, Lunch & Crab. By the time he opened Sam Choy’s Kahului in 1998, he was calling it “Fried Poke Magic,” but it was still so new I had to explain it had been “seared and served around a mound of rice.” It was served entree style on a plate, not in a bowl.

Choy had launched his Poke Festival in 1991 or 1992, and I attended many over the years. The poke was still a star in its own right, and rice was nowhere in sight.

A 1-Handed Meal

Pa‘ina Cafe co-owner Blaine Kimura explained that he and Uyehara were brainstorming with Uyehara’s brother, Craig, in 2007 when they needed a name for a concept they were about to unleash: the build-your-own poke bowl. Opting for simplicity, someone said, “Why not just call it a poke bowl?”

“At that time I was looking for a one-handed meal, something you could carry,” Kimura said. “A lot of yogurt shops were opening, and I liked the idea of customization. Choose your rice, choose your sauce, choose your toppings.”

They are now approaching a milestone of selling their millionth poke bowl.

‘Home Of The Best Poke’

But over on the North Shore, Kahuku Superette’s claim to fame is being “home of the best poke,” and Sheraton Waikiki executive sous-chef Colin Hazama remembers frequently ordering poke over rice as early as 2006.

“I would go diving out there and eat that before I started working at RumFire, which was in 2007,” he said. But it wasn’t billed as a poke bowl. Buyers simply requested to have it over rice.

The Gyotaku Connection

I put the poke bowl claim out on social media, and friends and followers quickly piped up that they swore they could get poke bowls at Gyotaku more than seven years ago.

Gyotaku co-founders Tom Jones and chef Nobutaka “Tony” Sato were considering acquiring Suehiro restaurant in 2001, and ate there as way to study the operation.

“They were serving poke with salmon belly, ahi, hamachi and tako, for something like $4.95,” Jones said. “It was the first time I’d ever seen poke made with an assortment of high-quality fish. I thought, ‘Well, no wonder they’re losing money. They’re giving this stuff away.’

“A week later I ordered it again with a side bowl of rice, and I told Tony we’ve got to put this on our menu.”

A deal was struck, the Suehiro name changed to Gyotaku, and in early 2002 they introduced their new dish as “assorted poke don,” using the Japanese word for “rice bowl.”

Sato, who grew up in Iwate, Japan, said, “Japan has something similar to poke don. We call it zuke don, many pieces of maguro in shoyu over rice.”

“Zuke,” meaning “marinated,” was developed by fishermen during the Edo period (1603 to 1868) as a means of preserving their catch.

“Maybe poke came from zuke, too,” Sato said.

He has a point. Hawaiian poke consists of sea salt, limu and inamona. There would be no ahi shoyu poke without the Japanese influence.

Made In Hawaii

“My background is in the IT business, so we did a lot of searching for poke bowl references online and we believe we were the first,” said Pa‘ina’s Kimura. “As more people, Foodland and Times started offering poke bowls, we came up with spinoffs like the Kewalo Bowl and California Bowl.

“At one point I was talking to Mel Tanioka, the godfather of poke, and he told me he wanted to start offering poke bowls, and I said, ‘Go for it!’

“Anybody can make a poke bowl, but we wanted to do it for a mass market.”

During our phone interview from California, where Kimura is vacationing, he said he’d seen several poke outlets there.

As the idea spreads far beyond our shores, he said, what’s most important now is to let the rest of the world know that poke and poke bowls are Hawaii products, no matter who came up with the name.

Reach Nadine Kam at nkam@staradvertiser.com.