Poké Reaches the Shores of Manhattan

In the late 1990s, the only place in New York City where I could find Hawaiian-style poké (poh-kay) was a fishmonger, now shuttered, on the Upper West Side.

The guy behind the counter had a girlfriend who worked the Continental Airlines route from Newark to Honolulu. This blessed woman, whose name I never learned, brought back inamona, a paste made from the roasted, crushed hearts of kukui nuts, and poké mix: careful proportions of alaea salt (stained red by volcanic clay), dried limu (seaweed native to the islands) and chile.

A tip of the ingredients over cubes of raw ahi, and time for the flavors to relax into each other: This was all that was required. The fishmonger offered the poké in plastic tubs, without ceremony, just as I had always known it in Honolulu, where I grew up and where some of the best poké is sold at a liquor store, Tamura’s.

Then, a few years back, poké started appearing on stray restaurant menus, sometimes identified as Hawaiian crudo or ceviche. (In Hawaiian, poké means “to cut crosswise in pieces.”) Now, almost all at once, Manhattan is home to three restaurants devoted to poké, in addition to a chef dealing poké out of a coffee shop that doubles as a karaoke bar.
The first to open, in October, was Sons of Thunder in Murray Hill. It is also the best.

The fish (ahi or salmon) is beautifully fresh and well cut, in hunks large enough to give a sense of plushness on the tongue. These may arrive under a gloss of shoyu (Japanese soy sauce) and sesame oil, with tracks of alaea salt and hijiki (seaweed), subtle and as essential as ligatures. Or a chile aioli whose slow-burn heat hums in the mouth without igniting it.

Elsewhere in town, poké is typically heaped on a stark bed of rice. Here, each bowl ($7.50 to $10.75) is a terrarium of mesclun greens and seaweed salad, offsetting the richness of the fish, with a humbler cushion of rice half-hidden below. Elsewhere, I also found the white rice too clumpy, the brown rice too dry; at Sons of Thunder, both are commendably fluffy. Extras like crispy shards of garlic or a tinsel of nori add textural interest, but you don’t need them.