The tuna and salmon poke bowl with spicy mayo at Go Fish Modern Japanese Kitchen in Tyler, Texas, on Wednesday, May 17, 2017. The new restaurant's menu features poke bowls and sushi burritos in addition to traditional sushi rolls. (Chelsea Purgahn/Tyler Morning Telegraph)

The restaurant business is all about niches, and Abi Ismantol and Ricky Mao think they’ve found theirs in Tyler. Their new restaurant, Go Fish Modern Japanese Kitchen, is bringing a West Coast food trend, the poke bowl, to East Texas.

“I was a head chef in a ramen restaurant in Colorado,” explained Ismantol, who serves as Go Fish’s chef now. “In the back of that restaurant they opened a poke bowl. As a chef, my wife is from Tyler, so I had the idea of bringing that poke bowl from the big city to here.”

And it’s catching on, he said.

“A poki bowl is a build-your-own rice bowl, which always includes really healthy food,” he said. “What you’re most likely to have in a poke bowl is raw fish, such as tuna and yellowtail. But here in Tyler, I have upgraded to include some cooked fish. I think sometimes people are a little afraid of raw fish. So I combined raw fish and cooked, such as fried shrimp, pork charsiu, grilled chicken, even baked eel.”

But both Ismantol and owner Mao are sushi chefs as well. They offer a number of sushi rolls, ranging from a Black Dragon Roll with crab salad, avocado and eel, to a Spider Roll with soft-shell crab, cucumber and masago.

“And we’re the first drive-through sushi in Tyler,” Ismantol added. “No one else has that. We want to be a little different.”

That’s a good way to describe another Go Fish specialty – the Sushi Burrito. Made with seaweed paper and rice, the burritos range from shrimp to spicy tuna to salmon.

With numerous daily specials – so numerous they fill a marker board, which is changed each day – the Go Fish menu is constantly changing.

“We use the best fish we can get,” Ismantol said. “The quality of sushi is all dependent on the quality of the fish. Our prices are low, but I get high quantity so I can get a good price, and pass that to the customers. For example, we smoke our salmon ourselves. I make all of my own sauces. And the rice is No. 1. You have to have good rice, and we use the best we can find.”

The restaurant seats about 24.

 

 

What: Go Fish Modern Japanese Kitchen

Where: 127 WSW Loop 323

When: 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday.

Pro tip: Try the deep fried avocado.