One of the things I like to do when visiting various metro areas is to visit their art museums, and I was surprised to realize that, despite 8 visits to Seattle since the 1990s, I had not yet visited the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). So, after a rather pleasant visit (pictures here), we found ourselves looking for a light lunch. By this point Pike Place was getting pretty busy (it was a Friday), but we found a nice, quiet spot just around the corner from SAM, Musubi Kai, an informal restaurant focusing on musubi and poke bowls.
Stepping into Musubi Kai, you can immediately see that they are trying to stick with a “Hawaiian Street Food” approach, this is more of a grab-and-go counter (with the typical ordering kioks) with only about a dozen small tables for doing a short sit-down meal; they definitely are expecting most people to order to go. But they’ve got a surprisingly good menu; while the focus is on straight up Spam musubi, poke bowls, and donburi, they actually have an impressive assortment of specialty variants of each, with 15 different varieties of musubi, a half dozen donburis, and four different poke bowl options. Add in a small selections of sides (including the near-obligatory potato salad), drinks, and some Dole whip for dessert, and they’ve got enough options for most everyone.
Myself, I like a classic Tuna poke bowl, and Musubi Kai’s version is good: a nice portion of fresh, nicely prepped ahi tuna over freshly-made rice, with onion, cucumber, corn, edamame, onion flakes, seaweed salad, and both sesame-soy and mango-chile sauces. Seattle has a lot of good options for poke bowls, but this one (and the salmon one that Carol got) are definitely some of the better ones I’ve had, and for the quality, the price is pretty reasonable (my tuna poke was $17, the salmon was $15).
But the attraction here is definitely the array of musubi options, most running $5 for a roll. We went with two regular, two deep-fried shrimp, and one Spam, egg, and avocado one. While these didn’t photograph well (due to the poly wrap), these were all good musubi. Nicely seared, nicely seasoned, and freshly made for the Spam ones, and the shrimp were perfectly done for those rolls as well.
Overall, we liked Musubi Kai. The quality was good, the staff friendly and efficient, and the price, while leaning a bit on the expensive side, reflect good quality in ingredients and execution. The nice thing was the quality and creativity in the specialty musubi flavors, many of which you aren’t easily going to find outside Hawaii. It’s definitely worth checking out.
