Where We're Eating, Tastemakers MeetupsSydney GallimoreSeptember 14, 2017

Poke Tea House

Where We're Eating, Tastemakers MeetupsSydney GallimoreSeptember 14, 2017

By Sydney Gallimore, @QueenoftheFoodage

If you follow me on Instagram or have spoken to me in real life in the past few months, you’ll know that I’m obsessed (seriously obsessed) with Poké Tea House. In fact, I even have a photo of me at PTH on my Bumble profile.

The way it works when you get there is you grab an order sheet and pick your favorite things. For a poké bowl, you first pick your base (sushi rice, brown rice, mixed greens, or zucchini noodles). Then you choose 1 or 2 proteins (1 for $11.99 or 2 for $14.50). Then you pick 3 mix-in ingredients, a sauce, and 2 toppings. My go to bowl order is sushi rice, ahi tuna, with cucumber, cilantro and pineapple mixed in, ponzu citrus sauce, and topped with spicy tuna and avocado, plus the sesame seeds and fried onions that come free.

They’re also one of the only places in the Holy City that offer a sushi burrito. The steps for that are pretty much the same as above, but you choose “burrito” instead of “bowl” when you fill out the sheet. I recently had a sample of one of their sushi burritos with salmon, and I can say that I’m a huge fan.

Then again, I don’t think I’ve ever met a sushi roll I didn’t love.

One thing that I didn’t think I was going to be a fan of was the SPAM misubi, which is apparently a popular snack in Hawaii. Since I’ve never been to Hawaii, I thought this was a practical joke of which I was the victim. Once I found out they were, in fact, serious, I resigned myself to giving it a try (I have a 1 bite rule: I have to take at least 1 bite of something, no matter how much it scares me). I’m so glad that I did, because I’m proud to say that it was delicious! It had so much flavor and I loved the different textures from the rice, seaweed, and SPAM. I highly recommend you give it a try!

But only at Poke Tea House or in Hawaii.

As implied by their name, they also have a great selection of bubble tea available as well. My favorite is the honeydew milk tea with strawberry jellies. Their tapioca bubbles are better than a lot of places that I’ve tried them, but I still get kind of freaked out by the texture, so the jellies are my fave.

During the summer they also had this really cool color-changing tea made with butterfly pea flower that was super neat. Basically the butterfly pea flower powder changes color when it interacts with an acid, so y when you pour in some lemon juice, it turns a completely different color. It tastes like a yummy lemonade, which my brain didn’t understand since it was purple.