Get the poke, man

So what’s a guy from New Mexico know about Hawaiian poke? Probably nothing. Which is probably how Ronnie Sanchez, a former executive chef at the Inn and Spa at Loretto in Santa Fe, went to the Red Salt restaurant at the Ko`a Kea Hotel in Kaua`i and came up with one of the best poke dishes I’ve ever had.

Dishes like kalua pig, laulau, and poi may be more quintessentially Hawaiian, but if I had to pick just one island food to have every day for a week (which I’ve done), I’d go for poke. I like both its simplicity and the way that you almost never get the same version of it twice. It’s like chili—everybody does it a little differently.

Basic poke is cubes of sashimi ahi, shoyu (soy sauce), sea salt, and chopped green onion. Simple, right? But then there are all the variations. Like using Maui onion instead of green onions, or adding a little sesame oil, chili pepper or hot sauce, maybe even a little chopped tomato if you’re into it and even garlic.

Of course, the really good Hawaiian chefs like to tart it up even more. Sam Choy, probably the best chef in Honolulu, adds a little inamona, the ground innards of a roasted kukui nut. He’ll also toss in a little chopped ogo (seaweed), as will a lot of Hawaiians. It gives it a little salty crunch that I really like.

So the other day I’m sitting at the Red Salt bar having a Red Coral martini and I just felt like a little something to nibble on so I asked the bartender, Jim, if the kitchen made poke.

“The best,” he said without any hesitation.

I like that.

Usually when you get poke it comes mounded in a little dish or, if it’s someplace fancy, they might serve it in a martini glass. So I was kind of surprised when my poke came out on a square white plate and looked kind of like a tic-tac-toe board. Man, I’d never seen poke like this before. Before I could even grab my chopsticks, Chef Sanchez came out of the kitchen to grab a Coke so I asked him about the dish.

“I keep playing around with it,” he told me. “It’s one of those dishes that is really simple but you can do fun things with it. Sometimes I serve it as poke lollipops.”

What he’d done is layer razor-thin slices of cucumber as a sort of canvas for nine squares of raw fish—ahi and sea bass—then decorated the squares with little circles of onion, shavings of green onion, fish roe, and a sprinkling of ogo. Gorgeous. And delicious. The perfect accompaniment to a Red Coral martini.