Arizona’s top poke bowl chain has made Gulfport its first Southeast location. We tried it
There’s counting your calories and then there’s really counting your calories.
A popular southwestern restaurant chain has made Gulfport its first location in the southeast corner of the country. Koibito Poke is the top poke restaurant in Arizona and has locations scattered in Nevada, Illinois and Missouri.
The restaurant was founded by former MLB veteran and two-time World Series champion Todd Stottlemyre in 2018. It’s designed to give you full customization of your meal while offering total control of your healthy eating goals.
Poke bowls are a Hawaiian dish that underwent a Japanese evolution at the turn of the 20th century. Fresh caught fish was mixed with local ingredients to form the original poke bowls before. Japanese settlers would later introduced soy sauce and sesame oil and eventually trade from the West Coast brought salmon and tuna in the mix.
It wasn’t until the 2010s when the dish began spreading through the United States. Search traffic on Google for “Poke bowl” grew by 100 percent between 2014 and 2019.
The same data tells us interest in poke bowls in Mississippi hit an all-time peak in May of this year. The leading metro? Biloxi-Gulfport. Pretty good timing for Koibito, which is now open at the suites across the street from Sam’s Club on Daniel Boulevard.
Here’s how the process works, what your options are and how many different ways you can craft a poke bowl.
How to master your poke experience
It’s a seven-step system that designs your bowl from the bottom up. It starts with the size of your bowl, ranging small to large. Small gets two scoops of protein, medium gets three and large gets four.
You start with a base: white, brown or cauliflower rice or spring mix. Then you decide your protein. You’ve got 10 options to choose from. This includes a regional swap with crawfish replacing the usual octopus.
Next is the lineup of sauces. Options include shoyu sauce, sriracha aioli (spicy mayo), champagne butter, sweet chili lime and more. You can get them on the side or none at all. Each sauce is gluten free.
Two more layers left. The toppings serve as the primary compliment to the protein. Shaved brussel sprouts, jalapenos, red or green onions, mango, cucumber are some of the 11 base topping options. The premium list offers masago, seaweed salad, crab meat and cucumber salad.
Finally, the garnish. Need it to kick? Wasabi will handle that. More crunch? Crispy onion is here. Basic? You can add avocado. And if you’re a big seed guy there are sesame seeds and furikake.
There’s a few different ways to craft the right bowl. More specifically there are 2,657,802,214,400 unique bowls to be made. So it shouldn’t be too overwhelming.
How many calories are in your bowl?
We can find out. A unique aspect to the experience is the online nutrition calculator. And it counts more than just the calories. You can monitor your intake of proteins, carbs, fat, fiber and sugar.
This allows you to plan out your meal ahead of time, track it while you’re ordering in real time or give you a chance to see the numbers once you’ve put together a bowl.
Working example: I went with white rice as a base. The proteins were shrimp, crawfish and spicy crab. Topped it with red onion and seaweed salad. On the side we splashed in champagne butter and sriracha aioli.
One caveat to be prepared for is the tracker is built for the traditional menu. You won’t find crawfish or mango on it. For your reference, a scoop a crawfish is about 20 calories and 4 grams of protein. No fiber, no sugar, no carbs and a negligible amount of fat.
The sauces are more customer discretion, so a table is provided to help break down how far the wasabi aioli took you over your calorie limit.
Adding the extra numbers to the calculator’s total gave me a full picture of what I just had. That was a 500 calorie meal featuring roughly 60 grams of carbs, 16 grams of protein, 16 grams of fat, 7 grams of sugar and 2 grams of fiber.
Full disclosure, I have no idea what any of that means for me. But for so many who are living much healthier than me the calculator is a great tool for genuinely good food.
There are also several signature bowls crafted by Koibido. The salmon bowl combines the fish with house sauce, edamame, cucumber, green onion, ginger, crab mix and sesame seeds. The California roll bowl takes crab mix with cucumber, avocado, sriracha aioli and furikake on your choice of rice or greens.
There’s plenty more. The menu is flexible by design and the order process streamlined. Koibido is Japanese for “Love.” If the reviews piling in are to be believed then you’ll love it, too.
Address: 15520 Daniel Boulevard Suite G, Gulfport Hours: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
