Cubed fresh ahi tuna marinated in soy, sesame, and green onion, served over rice with avocado, cucumber, edamame, and pickled ginger. Hawaii's ancient raw fish tradition remixed into the world's most-copied bowl.
Poke (pronounced poh-keh) means "to slice or cut crosswise" in Hawaiian. The original poke was not a bowl — it was a snack: pieces of freshly caught reef fish (usually limu, or seaweed-crusted rock salt-rubbed fish), eaten immediately by Hawaiian fishermen who cut the fish directly on the boat. Hawaiian fishermen have been eating raw fish this way since before European contact. The dish transformed in the 1970s when Japanese fishing communities in Hawaii began marinating the fish in soy sauce, sesame oil, and rice vinegar before the modern bowl format existed. The bowl format — poke over rice with toppings — is largely a product of the 2010s, when mainland America discovered the dish and translated it into the grain-bowl vocabulary it was already fluent in. The global poke boom that followed turned what was a humble seaside snack into a worldwide restaurant category. The version made by Hawaiian families at home is still different from what most people know: heavier on the sesame, simpler on the toppings, fish so fresh it barely needs seasoning. The ahi tuna — the big-eye or yellowfin caught off Hawaiian waters — is sweet enough that soy sauce and sesame oil is genuinely all it needs.
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