Westcoast Poké — Restaurant in Richmond

This is my usual poke place but lately I have just been so disappointed with their quality of food. Typically, I am not the type of person to complain, but my recent experiences have been atrocious. The first bad experience was this one time I ordered through uber eats. I always get the same BYOB, with edamame and jalapeños. I was so excited to eat my bowl, and realized that they have messed up my toppings and they added tobiko. Personally, not a big deal to me. It would be for other customers if they happened to be allergic to something and it was accidentally added to their bowl. I brushed it off and as I continued to eat, I found the bowl to be extremely spicy. I consider for me to have a high spice tolerance, but I started picking out all the jalapeños in my bowl and put them aside. As I was doing that, there was a tremendous amount of jalapeños, that it created a huge pile on my napkin. It was so spicy, it almost made it unenjoyable to eat. But what really tied it together was that there was a grass-like flavour in my bowl. It was the edamame. I'm not sure if it was old but it definitely was not tasting like how it was supposed to. In fact, the grass-like flavour was so empowering, I ended up throwing my bowl away out of disgust.

Super disappointed from that experience but I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and order from them again. Mind you, this is about a week after the previous incident. My friends and I decided to get poke for our lunch break. Service was good per usual, the portions for everything was meh. We ate back at work. All was good until I found a staple from my bowl (shown in the photo below). It was hidden in the rice and I noticed it when it was ALREADY IN MY MOUTH and had to pull it out of my mouth. I was at work and did not think it was worth my time going back to complain. I was contemplating if I should even continue to eat it but I ended up having to throw away another bowl, yet again. I'm super disappointed, this is usually my favourite poke place...

WESTCOAST POKE (Richmond)

8.5/10 Overall 8.6/10 Food Quality 7.6/10 Value

More of a take-out spot rather than dine-in. I love my poke bowls and this one is pretty solid. The Pokeman and The Poke Guy are probably my top ones. This one isn't too far behind! Let me note that I ONLY do Build Your Own Bowls at any poke shop. I like to customize and choose my own protein, toppings and sauce!

BUILD YOUR OWN LARGE BOWL, substitute for AHI TUNA $16.95 + $3 = $19.95 I always get: half greens half brown rice, ahi tuna, shoyu, scallion, cilantro, sweet onion, pickled red onion, burnt miso chili, pickled ginger, radish, cucumber, edamame, 2 x seaweed salad, wasabi garlic, gochu garlic, fried onion, fried garlic, tempura crunch, masago, pea shoots, togarashi, furakake, sesame seeds, nori, crunch mix. I also love taking this home, dumping it into a large mixing bowl and mixing it all up! Then I'll re-dish it out. 8.6/10

TERIYAKI CHICKEN MEDIUM BOWL $11.95 (Daily Special) Chicken, Sweet Onion, Scallion, Cucumber, Ginger, Jalapeño, Mango, Crab Salad, Miso Ginger Soy Sauce, Maple Soy Sauce. Typically I would never get these pre-determined bowls, but decided to try it and save a couple bucks because of the daily special deal. It was ok. I would prefer a standard chicken teriyaki bowl from a Japanese restaurant though. 7.3/10

Would I come back? Definitely. FYI they recently upped their pricing by a...

I am not exaggerating when I say this is the best poké I've had in Vancouver. It was the second poké place I tried and it was so much better than the poké I had at Hoké Poké in Kits that I assumed that Hoké just made bad poké. Since then I've had poké at a number of restaurants and none of them compare to the variety and freshness of Westcoast. They have the most delicious mixins, fresh mango and pineapple, their avocado is never underripe, their fish is flavourful and generous, they add enough sauce(a rarity, it seems) by default, they have a variety of spicy mixins, and their attention to detail is top notch(for example, they cut up their pickled ginger so you can spread it throughout your meal instead of just in a few bites). They also have more sour flavours than most places, which I really like, offering spicy cucumber kimchi, picked sweet onions, tart sauces and hot sauces at the end. Their crown jewel, unusually, is this sauce they have sometimes that's kind of like a mushrooms tapenade and a spoonful of it adds the most amazing umami flavour to your meal. They also have a location near Olympic village if Ironwood is out of the way for you. I can't wait for them to get...