Poke & Roll fun new spot to build poke bowl, sushi burrito in Cuyahoga Falls | Local Flavor

It's a fun experience to eat poke and sushi and explore boba tea with your college kid.

That's exactly what my daughter Anna and I did for lunch on a recent Monday at the new Poke & Roll restaurant in Cuyahoga Falls.

Anna's a bit of an "expert" when it comes to sushi and boba, considering she loves both and spends a lot of time consuming them with her friends. In fact, as a freshman at Ohio State University last year, she ate poke on campus several times a week.

Anna, 19, has loved boba since she was a little kid with a sweet tooth and first tried it at a Vietnamese restaurant in Cleveland. So this visit to the new Poke & Roll, which opened June 15, was right up her alley.

The small restaurant is housed in an unassuming commercial plaza on Hudson Drive that has a new Biggby Coffee drive-thru next door, which opened in April. Both are owned by Michael Ren of Solon, who also owns Biggby locations in Shaker Heights and Bedford Heights.

Poke & Roll is the first restaurant that Ren, 36, has owned. He grew up in China and has lived in Ohio for about 20 years, since he went to college at Heidelberg University in Tiffin. He and his wife, Megan, who now have three children, came to Northeast Ohio when Megan, a chemist, was working on her master's degree at Case Western Reserve University Medical School.

Both of them love sushi, so it made sense to open a restaurant with sushi burritos and poke bowls, a Hawaiian dish with chunks of raw, marinated fish with rice, vegetables and sauces. It's been a popular trend in the United States for years.

At Poke & Roll, you walk up to a counter and can build your own poke bowl or sushi burrito, much like the Chipotle concept. I'd never had a sushi burrito, so I was intrigued by the concept.

Friendly employee Jun Slawson explained to me that a sushi burrito, which is wrapped in seaweed, is comparable to the size of a Chipotle burrito. It's basically a really big sushi roll that isn't cut into bite-sized pieces.

The restaurant's sushi burrito is tightly wrapped in red and white, checkered sandwich paper and then cut in half for ease of eating.

You can either build your own sushi burrito or go for one of the restaurant's signature burritos. The volcano features spicy tuna with avocado; eel sauce; various vegetables; and furikaki, which is a sprinkled mixture of sesame seeds, seaweeds, herbs and fish flakes.

Chicken bibimbap features chicken, various veggies, a Gochujang Korean spicy and sweet sauce, and toasted sesame seeds. Ren got the idea for the bibimbap from the traditional Korean rice bowl that's mixed with meat and assorted vegetables.

The California sushi burrito features imitation crab, the Hawaii has shrimp and imitation crab, and the Rainbow has tuna, imitation crab and more. Poke & Roll's top-selling signature sushi burrito is the Rainbow, whose eel sauce gives it some sweetness.

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I decided to build my own sushi burrito for the first time ever, with the helpful Slawson answering my questions about sauces and more. You start with the rice, then choose your protein, and then can pick five toppings along with dressings and final flavorings.

I went with spicy tuna, carrot, edamame, avocado and seaweed, then added tamari (gluten free Japanese sauce) and the restaurant's signature poke sauce, which Slawson said would add some sweetness. I topped that off with tempura flakes.

As you're building a sushi burrito, keep in mind that avocado, seaweed and masago (fish roe) each cost $1 extra. Altogether, my big burrito cost $15.99.

That may sound a bit pricey but this food was ultra fresh and a great option for a healthy, high-quality lunch. The service was speedy, and it was fun watching Slawson prep and roll my massive sushi burrito.

I wondered if biting into this mega burrito was going to be a messy experience. But I'm happy to say that just a few stray pieces of edamame and carrots fell out of my burrito, which was more than enough for a meal.

Anna ordered a spicy salmon poke bowl, which was a was beautiful, colorful sight with cucumber, carrot, edamame, red cabbage and avocado. She was adventurous, adding colorful orange masago (fish eggs) along with spicy mayo, Gochujang sauce, toasted sesame seed and sushi ginger for a bowl totaling $14.99.

Here's Anna's verdict: "I would take my friends here because it's good. It's more authentic than the ones (poke bowl eateries) at OSU because of the wide variety of ingredients."

Her poke bowl was a sweeter-tasting concoction than my sushi burrito was, and we had fun sampling each other's choices. Slawson suggested I try eel sauce next time for a sweeter option.

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Boba at Poke & Roll

The sweet treat for my lunch was the boba, which was both a thirst quencher and a true dessert, in my book. Boba is a tea-based drink that originated in Taiwan in the 1980s.

At Poke & Roll's boba bar, you can choose from six milk teas or six fruit teas. Then you pick from eight add-ins, including traditional boba; mango jelly; lychee jelly; strawberry, blueberry or peach popping boba; coffee jelly and whipped cream.

Ren said his most popular fruit tea is mango passion fruit and his most popular milk tea is the purple-colored taro, made with taro powder derived from the taro root vegetable. His own favorite add-in is the coffee jelly.

Anna went for green matcha milk tea ($5.69) from the Japanese green tea, adding the black-colored traditional boba, or little balls of tapioca. I got the mango and passionfruit tea with lychee jelly ($5.69).

The best part about drinking boba is definitely sucking the sweet, chewy tapioca boba balls through the straw. Instead of tapioca balls this time, though, my choice of lychee jelly was shaped like little jellied slivers, which were sweet and chewy.

The lychee is a tropical fruit with bumpy red skin that's popular in China, Ren said.

There's more fun for kids of all ages now at Poke & Roll. Ren just got a "fairy floss" automated cotton candy machine from China up and running. The kid-friendly machine, which features a robotic arm, offers customers 24 cute choices of 3D cotton candy shapes.

Arts and restaurant writer Kerry Clawson may be reached at 330-996-3527 or kclawson@thebeaconjournal.com.

Details

Restaurant: Poke & Roll

Address: 3464 Hudson Drive, Suite 101, Cuyahoga Falls

Hours: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday-Saturday, noon to 7 p.m. Sunday

Phone: 330-615-2666

Information: eatpokenroll.com or Poke & Roll on Facebook, @eatpokenroll on Instagram

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Poke & Roll fresh, fun with poke bowls, sushi burritos, boba in Falls