KOI poke + etc, is a new poke shop that has opened near Stadium Chinatown Skytrain station. The restaurant is airy with light wood furniture and white walls. It’s clean and all the ingredients are displayed behind a glass partition for you to choose from.
I stopped by last weekend with Benton to check out a couple of their bowls during their soft opening.
There are two size choices for ‘Choose Your Bowl’. We went with the regular size, but there is a large size available for $15.95.
The regular size allowed us to choose 2 protein items, 5 vegetable items (additional $0.50 per topping), 1 sauce to mix with the vegetables, 1 to mix with protein, and a choice of 2 condiments.
There is a relatively large selection of items to choose from, but we went the following:
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- KOI white rice
- Shrimp and Marinated Tofu
- Edamame
- Pineapple
- Beets
- Carrot
- Cucumber
- Tomato
- Tamago
- Avocado (+$1.50)
- Nori and toasted sesame
We decided to go with their house special spicy sauce (predominately gochujang flavour) and creamy sesame.
The creamy sesame sauce was my favourite as there was a strong nutty flavour from the sesame that went well with all the ingredients.
The ingredients were relatively fresh, and the shrimp was snappy. However, the rice could use some work as it was clumpy and mushy.
The torched bulgogi beef was really delicious and the smokey taste from the motoyaki sauce went well with the sesame seed topping. The wakame was well marinated and had a nice sharp acidic taste that complimented the beef. The cabbage was a bit excessive and didn’t add anything to the bowl, I would ask to omit that if I ordered this bowl again.
Overall, there are some kinks that definitely need to be worked out. The rice definitely needs to be improved upon. The sauces were quite good and the stand outs for me was the sesame sauce and the wasabi basil.