At Sam Choy’s Diamond Head on a windy October night, the night crew is in the process of closing down the joint. I arrive right before 10 p.m., the last customer and slip into one of the chairs at the stainless steel counter fronting the open kitchen. I order a pint of Sam Choy’s house brewed cream ale and a plate of seared pokè. The lightly cooked fish, still raw in the middle comes in a simple noodle bowl adorned with wispy brown ogo seaweed and tiny edible flowers. The executive chef at Sam Choy’s, Aaron Fukukda, has elected to make his poke with striped marlin. It has a lighter color than ahi and a slightly stronger flavor which balances the soy sauce, green onions and sweet onions tossed with the fish. Chopsticks at ready, I dive in. “Good poke, eh?” says Fukukda with a smile. I nod and keep eating. When I finish, he asks one of his line cooks to mix me a fresh batch of ahi poke. This one has a little more bite from the finely diced onions and uncooked soy sauce but the velvety texture of the half-inch cubes of raw fish comes cleanly through. “So how many places you going to eat poke?” asks Fukuda. I say I am not sure but I need to try the best and do it all in 24 hours. He grins and says. “There’s a lot of good poke on Oahu

Indeed there is. And I have my work cut out for me as I search for poke perfection. The proper pronunciation is poh-kay and it rhymes with O.K. The literal translation of this old Hawaiian word is “to slice, cut crosswise into pieces or cubes.” At its most basic level, good pokè is just fresh raw fish minimally seasoned with salt, chili water, limu (seaweed) and ‘inamona, a spicy powder made by grinding up kukui (also known as candlewood) nuts. “Imagine a guy out in a canoe pulling in reef fish,” says Alan Wong, a James Beard award-winning chef whose three Hawaii-themed restaurants always have pokè on the menu. “He takes a small fish and takes a rock or something sharp to score the flesh and cube the meat still on the bone. He pours in a little salt and some ‘inamona over the exposed flesh. And then he eats it almost like a snack, right on the bone. That’s how it started,” says Wong.

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—Alex, 07/24/06