Pokinometry is a successful concept. And with all successful concepts, it was going to happen sooner or later: you're going to get copycats.
If you look at the menu, Wow Bento in Irvine looks to be a nearly exact copy of Pokinometry's menu and assembly line setup: you either want a poke rice bowl (white or brown), a salad, or nachos. Then you add avocado, crab meat, cucumber, and sliced onion. Next, three choices of fish from this list: spicy tuna, salmon, tuna, albacore, shrimp, octopus, scallop, or tamago. Then, the sauce from no spicy to hot. Finally, there's the station with ginger, green onion, masago, and wasabi. The charge: $8.
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Wow Bento does offer two things Pokinometry doesn't: it has a soy paper wrap option if you want to make a sort of poki-ritto, and it also offers tofu as a protein if you're not into the whole raw fish thing.
Wow Bento is open Monday to Friday 10 a.m.-3 p.m.
10 McLaren Ste A, Irvine, CA 92618-2820, 949-699-0808; http://www.wowbentoca.com/
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Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.