Good Sh*t From Hawaii: How I Invented the Poke Bowl

I am really pleased that Mainland folks with very little if any connection to Hawaii have embraced the poke bowl.  Like the Spirit of Aloha, surfing, and hula, all Hawaii residents should be proud to add the savory raw fish dish to the list of Hawaiian exports.  I for one can take personal pride in the feat, because, you see:  I.  Invented.  The poke bowl.

The first time I encountered poke was at my first ever luau, which I attended in the 1970s.  I forget the occasion, but it was a classic Hawaiian luau in a large field, where beneath large tarpaulin tents, hundreds of ohana and guests gathered.  There was hula and a steel guitar band.  As a nine year old at the time, this is the extent of detail I recall, save one other.  I remember the poke.  My 11 year old friend gave me a paper cup and grinned, "here, try this."  I put the purple, slimy morsel in my mouth and immediately gagged.  It was cold, clammy, and salty.  In retrospect, I'm surprised I didn't bother to ask or hesitate before popping it past my lips.  I thought I was being fed boogers.  It was my first ever experience with raw fish.  Luckily, in the ensuing years I quickly took to sashimi and sushi and ceviche and poisson cru and all things seafood, and my first ever encounter with the Hawaiian version of raw fish was but a footnote.

Fast forward to the Nineties, after seven years of college and law school, and I returned to Hawaii,  fully immersing myself in the outrigger paddling lifestyle.  Such a life involved canoe paddling on the beautiful blue-green water surrounding our islands almost every day from February to October, punctuated by almost weekly races.  My canoe club was a notorious party club.  We often found ourselves after these races reveling well into the night.  We enjoyed sharing coolers of beer, meats grilled on hibachis set up on the grass or sand, and plastic containers of poke, which we purchased from any number of supermarkets selling it as an item as unremarkable as apples or hot dogs.  The variety was endless, consisting of ahi tuna, octopus, marlin, even raw white crab.  Drizzle these with sesame oil, green onions, shoyu (soy sauce), and chili pepper flakes, and you have a basic poke.  But you might also find minced garlic, chopped kukui or macadamia nut, shredded ginger, even a Sriracha-mayonaise dressing to make it spicy.  All of this would be passed around amongst my paddling teammates and shared with endless beer after beer.  Mostly, we would pick the hunks of fish out of the containers with our fingers, or maybe chopsticks if we refused to be uncouth.  This was my Nineties.

Then one Sunday, I thought to myself, "this poke would be good with some hot rice."  I was thinking of the Japanese chirashi dishes that many sushi restaurants offered.  Rather than serving sashimi nigiri style, on bullets of rolled rice one at a time, chirashi was a large shallow bowl of warm sushi rice, upon which a layer of sashimi - ahi, hamachi, salmon, chutoro and otoro - was decoratively arranged for one to heartily dig into with chopsticks.  This is what I wanted for my poke, and no one had ever seen it served that way before.

Before my Hawaiian chirashi idea, poke was more an appetizer, to be served as I had experienced it 2 decades before; in a paper cup served on the side of a luau plate, little better than an afterthought to the entree of kalua pig, shoyu chicken, and rice.

By the end of that particular canoe season, my teammates were bringing portable rice cookers to the races, to enjoy with the poke that would inevitably be passed around.  I even introduced my new wife to it by instituting a Monday Night Football picnic, wherein I came home with poke from the store and cooked up a pot of rice, which we would enjoy sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the football game, eating from the Japanese bowls we got in our wedding.

Still, this particular style of serving poke was not seen in local eateries, much less in fancy Pacific Rim Fusion cuisine places like Roy's or Sam Choy's until a few years after our wedding.  The first "poke bowl" I noticed on a menu was at a small "plate lunch" restaurant.  Historians are convinced (OK, I, I am convinced) that that poke bowl can be traced backwards from paddler to paddler all the way back to my canoe club's tarp tent. 

In the ensuing years, I noticed poke bowls at Zippy's, the humble and ubiquitous Hawaiian diner franchise, and at Sam Choy's Breakfast Lunch & Crab on the high end.   To me, it reached local saturation when groceries offered a poke bowl option at their fresh fish counter.  I recognized it as a popular explosion when a friend of a friend, both of whom lived in the Mid-West, sheepishly asked me about poke bowls on Facebook, when she learned I was from Honolulu.

And to that, you can bet my first reply to her was "You know.  I. Invented. The poke bowl."

On My Wall: Shy Luchmand's Harley Girl

In 1990, George H.W. Bush was drawing a line in the sand, Twin Peaks was preparing to jump the shark in its second season, and culture was still very much locked in the Eighties.  I had landed in London for my second year of law school, where me and me mates had managed to rent the top two floors of a Clapham row house belonging to an elderly Irish couple who always made it available to Notre Dame students abroad.  One look at the price of burritos in the Taco Bell on Piccadilly and I knew I needed to watch my pounds sterling, at least enough to keep my local willingly pouring pints of Guinness for me between classes.

Of course, this frugality didn't last long, and soon enough I was spending as frivolously as ever.  A poster of a Harley Girl was probably one of the first luxuries I treated myself to.  I found her at the Camden Lock flea market one sunday, so I must've still been trying to pinch my pence a bit.  Nevermind who Shy Luchmand is; apparently he's some photographer, somewhere south of Man Ray, and West of Nagel.  I liked her because, like the Eighties, she radiated style, rebellion, and edge.  Flannel and combat boots was still a good couple of years away.  Leather, chrome, and shades, and studiously tousled locks of blonde were still not ironic.

When I left London, I left her on my wall in Clapham along with an empty bottle of Beaujolais covered with a year's accumulation of candle wax.  If I could find an actual poster sized image of her, instead of this blown up thumbnail, I'd pay the equivalent worth today of what I paid then, on the cobblestones of Camden.

If this is your image, you must be Shy Luchmand.  Please let me continue to use it.  However, if you disapprove, feel free to let me know and I will take it down.

Seinfeld & Superman

Was this the zenith of 90s advertising? Yeah, I think so too. From my perspective, the only way to improve this would be to have Jerry pal around with the Caped Crusader. But I think the mood and tone would change.

"Oh YES! Wyoming."

The Unified Theory of Pop Music

There’s been a general lack of one of those Unified Theory posts of late. Fancy cars, movie reviews, and the occasional witty bon mot do not a good read make. I suppose this can be attributed to nothing in particular. Or it can be blamed on one specific thing.

On December 18, 2006, I had been married for four years and my son was not quite three years old. We had just taken on a new mortgage and my law firm was just getting its legs. Possibilities stretched out before me, my bachelorhood a distant and uninteresting past. Then the world came crashing down. Tower Records closed its doors worldwide, including the three locations in my town.
This doesn’t have to be an Eighties Nostalgia blog in order to highlight the importance of Tower Records. Tower was born in the Seventies. It grew through the Eighties and Nineties, during which time it saw the transition from record albums to CDs, Beta and VHS tapes to DVDs. When I first started going to the Tower on Keeaumoku Street (pictured above), disco was still a living, breathing, pulsating beast. Aside from Cheap Trick, Devo, and Cars records, I was only ever interested in the hundred or so albums in the “import” bin. Adult contemporary was a vast expanse that I never explored. At the dawn of the MTV era, “imports” disappeared as a category and the more obscure artists that interested me (which included the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Police) found their way into the general population. There was a time that the only place one could find a copy of the Clash’s Sandinista was at a genuine communist bookstore near the University. When it appeared in Tower’s stacks, I knew a new era of pop music had arrived. In the new millennium, there was little evidence that we were seeing Tower’s final years.

No matter where I lived, D.C., London, even northern Indiana, the location of the nearest Tower Records was one of the first navigation points I committed to memory. It was that important.

In 2006, Tower was unceremoniously shelved, its stock unloaded at ever-plummetting discounts. There were many items I acquired cheaply during these final weeks of liquidation before that December 18. Things I wouldn’t otherwise have bought at retail prices. AC/DC. Pink Floyd. Jack Johnson. But there were things I failed to secure only because I was waiting for prices to drop further before the axe fell, but they never fell far enough. I had my eye on them, though. The Heavy Metal movie soundtrack. The updated Criterion Collection boxset of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (I had already owned the previous edition and wouldn’t justify the repeat expense without deep discounting).


This last ditch flurry of spending at Tower was mostly afterthought, and really, for me an unfitting farewell to an establishment that I used to wander through, often for as long as time would allow. Hours? Maybe. The better part of one for sure. Stack after stack after stack? Definitely. I used to love the unscheduled stop into Tower, when I had nowhere else to be. Maybe I had an inkling that a new CD had been released and I wanted to find it and snap it up quickly, so I could immerse myself in the new music, headphones on and liner notes open. Maybe I had absolutely nothing in mind and I would just let my thumb and forefinger do the searching. That’s how I discovered the Violent Femmes back in 1984, and Pearl Jam in 1991.

The protagonist in one of the books in my canon, High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby – a man as adept at observing the immature male of the species as Britain has ever produced – finds comfort in organizing his record collection not alphabetically but autobiographically ("How did I get from Fleetwood Mac's Rumours to Howlin' Wolf in just seven moves?"). Similarly, I tell you, for example, that I bought Husker Du's Warehouse: Songs and Stories in the Tower in D.C.'s Foggy Bottom neighborhood amidst a lengthy bout of angst.

I find that my acquisition of music is slowing down and more focused. I think in general, once far away from bachelorhood, musical tastes have cemented, and that is probably the biggest cause of this narrowing. But also, when the journey of discovery is no longer tactile, across the stacks at a record store, and more often on a website like Amazon or at a brick and mortar like Best Buy (which is unabashedly set up for the Transaction, and staffed with generalists), something is lost.

The further away I get from December 18, 2006, part of the enjoyment of music is lost. The act of discovery part. Which is a damn shame because then the sharing of music part eventually also diminishes. I used to play music for my wife all the time and once, she had a friend steal my truck so she could have a new stereo installed as a Christmas gift because (a) she knew how important music was to me and (b) my old stereo was really only a radio.

I can’t share music that I’ve already shared, otherwise it becomes a crusade. That would be like a Jehovah’s Witness coming back to knock on the same door twice.

Reflecting on this I realize that, as much as I love my wife and as much as she completely dwells in my heart, I don’t believe I’ve ever made her a mix tape. High Fidelity very nearly fetishizes the mix tape. The mix tape is a proclamation. It is a love letter. It is a seduction. It is an entendre. I’ve been known to make mix tapes in my time, and they’ve always had meaning (it’s like that conversation between Jackson and Travolta in Pulp Fiction: “I’ve given lots of foot massages and every one of them meant something”).

Now, without Tower Records, I’m not sure if I can really make that mix tape for my wife with the meaning it should have.

But I Don't Wanna Be a Pirate

When I lived out on the East Coast, most of what I wore came from catalogs, L.L. Bean, J.Crew, Land's End, Orvis. Many an afternoon was spent thumbing through somebody's catalogs. It was better than studying, at least. One catalog I never ordered from, (or ever received for that matter)was from J. Peterman. I may have come across one in someone else's dormroom, but not mine. I remember them, though, images that were barely sketches, sometimes maybe watercolors. And copy describing their wares in some Kiplingesque context, with Peterman as the hero. A bit silly for me. But out of a sense of humor and an allegiance to Seinfeld, I ordered the latest J. Peterman catalog, and it arrived recently.

You know the Seinfeld connection, and the arc of the Elaine character. She starts as a copywriter, tutors a psychotic war veteran on how to write the perfect Peterman ad, rockets to the position of president when J. decides to go on a vision quest to Burma, and comes tumbling down when when she spends all the company's money thinking, as president, she can do what she wants. Along the way is the rough and tumble story of the urban sombrero, the Kennedys' wedding cake, and the attempt to buy Kramer's life story to pass it off as Peterman's own. Rip-snorting stuff, really, and I have now inadvertantly confessed to how I spent the Nineties.




Where was I? Yes, rip-snorting. Certainly all fabricated. Impossibly unbelieveable. Well, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, on the contrary. I give you, Exhibit A, The Great American Shirt:
Described as follows: The original Great American Shirt (pre-Revolutionary days to ca. 1875) was cut extra-long, with extra-full sleeves that had lots of gathers. What you see here is a Civil-War Cavalry issue; you may recall Costner wearing it in Dances With Wolves. It gives a man freedom to move. When he catches sight of himself, he just naturally thinks, hmm, looking good, and so do other people.

Oh really, J? I believe, in Seinfeld circles, we know it as The Puffy Shirt.