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The white rice and with tender strips of soy-marinated meat came topped with sliced scallions and crispy garlic chips, both providing crunch and jolts of flavor playing off the mellower beef. While purist poke involves only raw fish, Paina Cafe also offers Kalua pig and cooked beef, the latter in its Hawaiian beef bowl ($9.25). Shredded nori brought more of a hint of the sea than the neutrally flavored tuna, and a surfeit of tempura flakes provided crunch in every bite, offsetting the fish’s tender lushness. The brown rice came topped with well-trimmed fish with a middlin’ amount of fire that was tamed but not obliterated by the teriyaki glaze.

Spicy tuna paired well with the smaller Poke Crunch Bowl ($9.95/$11.25), which was the size of a soup bowl. There are lots of design-your-own options, with six to eight seafood and tofu choices and 15 toppings, but even some of the prescribed combos allow you to select whatever fish you like (and all can be ordered with white or brown rice). And contrasting textures and flavors elevate poke well beyond fish trimmings. Of course, most poke today gets the same attention as the best sushi with many flavors in common, as in the wasabi masago ahi poke or the shoyu ginger salmon poke at Paina Cafe. Just as France’s vaunted sauces were created initially to compensate for inferior meats, poke began as a way for fishermen to use their trimmings. Poke, in the Hawaiian context, is a raw-fish assemblage resembling a salad over a bed of rice to make it a meal. More recently, a flurry of poke restaurants, with island import Paina Cafe (three locations near Honolulu, where it claims it invented the poke bowl) chief among them. It started with the arrival of “Hawaiian barbecues,” which are great if you like Spam musubi and plate lunches with copious carbs. Benjamin Hager Las Vegas Review-Journal influx of Hawaiian immigrants that’s given the valley ninth-island status is perhaps most apparent in the restaurant industry. Aloha soy sauce at Paina Cafe on Tuesday, May 9, 2017, in Las Vegas.