Hardwood Poke Offers Bountiful Harvest From the Sea

At Hardwood Poke Co. in Water Mill, chef Henry Margaritas and Mariah Rocker are doing for the bounty of the fall harvest from the sea what their host, the Green Thumb Organic Farm, does for the bounty from the soil.

The yellowfin and bigeye tuna that Rocker and Margaritas use in their intricately constructed poke bowls and sushi wraps are line-caught — often by Margaritas himself — from boats at marinas never more than a short drive from where the little red food trailer flings open its service window for a scant few hours on weekend afternoons.

While poke in Hawaii was traditionally made with the less desirable cuts from the fish, Hardwood Poke uses the prime loins of nearly translucent tuna meat, cubed precisely in glistening red squares for its poke — a process that takes the pair hours of prep before each day’s business.

The exclusivity of the resource and labor intensity of bringing it to consumers means that local poke lovers have to scramble to get at theirs before they are gone. Hardwood’s schedule is officially 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Friday to Sunday but comes with the express warning that those hours may be cut short by the supply of fresh tuna. It often is.

Margaritas is a classically trained chef — and an obsessive tuna fisherman. (The food truck is named after his boat). Rocker is a Hawaiian native. A visit to Oahu was all it took for the pair to see a dream that came true this summer on Montauk Highway.

“She invited me out there two years ago, and I had no idea how good the culinary scene is out there. She took me to her favorite poke place and I was blown away, like what the heck, this is not what it’s like on the mainland,” Margaritas said. “I’m a chef and, like, a badass tuna fisherman, and I’ve been seeing tuna come into kitchens and breaking them down. And I always wanted to do something with them. I said to her if we did this in Southampton, with fresh fish, it would kill it. That was two years ago, and it was kind of a pipe dream.

Sometimes dreams are just on the other side of the door. The trick is hearing opportunity knocking.

The couple mentioned their dream offhand to some local friends, Sam and Ray Halsey, whose family own the Green Thumb. The Halseys mentioned that there was a food trailer that had been the foundation of a vision for a mobile salad station that never came to fruition and was just rusting away.

Knock knock.

Margaritas named his boat Hardwood because his dad is a carpenter. The logo is a tuna with a table saw blade where the fish’s dorsal fin would be. The winter offseason was spent gutting and rebuilding the Halsey’s old trailer into a sparkling miniature professional kitchen.

Poke, pronounced POH-kee, means “to cut” in Hawaiian. Rocker, who is from “the Big Island,” says that in Hawaii, poke was traditionally a simple, casual dish of just fish.

“The base is always green onions [scallions], sweet Maui onion and salt,” Rocker says.

Japanese and Americanized influences have more recently introduced rice and other ingredients like edamame, crispy onions, furikake and sesame seeds to form the bowls that have spread to the mainstream, and the mainland, in forms that are sometimes savvily concocted, sometimes less so.

“There are a lot of classic shops that don’t do toppings at all, just the poke,” Rocker says of the best Hawaiian poke spots. “You just buy it by the pound. The bowls are a sort of a newer thing.”

The couple assemble the Hardwood Poke Co. bowls with an eye to both the traditional and careful concoctions of ingredients picked off the produce tables of the Green Thumb, a few feet away.

The little red trailer will keep flinging open its window through October — which can be the peak of the yellowfin tuna fishing season off the South Fork. But once the tuna move on, so will Hardwood.

“October is my favorite month to fish, and you’ve got Pumpkintown going on, so we’ll keep it going,” said Margaritas, who adds that the winter offseason will be spent honing new dreams for next season. “The dream was to catch all the fish myself, but it’s a tremendous amount of work even only being open three days since we are the cooks, the prep cooks, the dishwashers, so when it doesn’t come off my boat I get it from other fishermen I know. The farthest I’ve gone is Fire Island. So once the tuna stop biting here — we don’t want to import anything.”