Aloha Hawaiian Grill & Poke - Review
Hawaiian Potential
Heard from many friends to check out this new poke place, Aloha Poke & Grill. Was pretty excited as well as many had said it was better than some of the current places in Edmonton that offered poke by the pounds. So I ordered a bunch and ate it all. Here are my thoughts.
The poke itself is decently marinated. They have the usual salmon or tuna varieties. My favorite flavors are the spicy mayo and California. Kinda wish they had seaweed for purchase as it’s an easy way to put poke on and devour. Instead of just eating it raw, I mean if you like it raw that’s fine as well. I prefer it raw, but sometimes it’s nice just to wrap it and put it in your mouth.
I was recommended to try the poke burrito by a friend and was kind of disappointed. This is because I’ve had sushi burritos before and enjoyed them from Sushi Shop. Weird I know but it’s solid from there. The poke burrito from Aloha was dense from the rice. It’s way too much. Shoving poke into a tube of rice had made me feel so heavy after eating. Realistically could’ve replaced some rice with some pineapple or just more poke. The burrito also had pickled ginger in it which really threw me off much like grapefruit in a fruit salad.
As a snack, we had also ordered a couple of masubis. The spicy mayo crunchy was breaded spam musubi that was deep-fried and then covered with tonkatsu sauce, spicy mayo, and green onion. It had a good crunch and the mix of tonkatsu and spicy mayo was great. My only complaint was that the spam was fresh out of the can basically. It wasn’t marinated or fried. That was also my main complaint with the regular musubi. It was a boring piece of spam. Also, the regular musubi had spam squished between two chunks of rice so when you bite it you don’t even taste the spam, just rice. Less rice and fry the spam pls ty.
I had to make a second trip back to Aloha to try the grill portion of their menu as it wouldn’t be fair to make a review on just one aspect of its menu. The most popular grill dish was the Loco Moco. It had Japanese rice with a homemade patty, sunny side-up eggs, and dressed with some in-house gravy. Seeing as I was skeptical from the first visit, this dish made up for it’s shortfalls. The patty was amazing with the egg yolks oozing onto them. Gravy played an important part by really making the rice easier to digest. Served on a hot plate, this dish was sizzling and delicious from beginning to end.
Definitely coming back for more grill items and maybe a few pounds of poke. Just wish they could hammer out some of the issues with the burrito and musubi. Overall, i think Aloha will do well in the future and is worth a visit.
Sal says: Just try it (3.9/5)
