When Poké Bowl owners and brothers Jeron Dotson and Justin Bush were brainstorming their annual ideas to make changes or upgrades to their restaurant, they settled on one project that would solve both a technical problem and an aesthetic one.
The Poké Bowl, which opened nearly three years ago and is located at 1214 University Avenue in the city’s University Avenue Corridor, has been an exciting and welcome addition to a strategically important region of the city, located near Kettering University, Hurley and McLaren hospitals, and the University of Michigan-Flint. Those anchor institutions bring significant traffic to the city each day, so expanding businesses in that corridor makes sense. But for the Poke Bowl, one of the first new businesses to root itself there, it comes with the challenge of training people used to breezing by on their way to work to stop and realize there’s a restaurant they can go into.
“Because we’re not right on the strip of Saginaw Street, or what we consider the downtown marketplace, this is kind of more of a transitional space, so it can be difficult getting people to say, ‘Hey, we wanna stop here,’” Dotson said. “Word of mouth has helped spread with students and nurses and doctors, and we’re starting to get more and more of that, but a lot of people come in and say, ‘I’ve passed by there so many times.’ And it’s either, ‘I didn’t know it was open’ or ‘I didn’t know where it was at.’ We have good, quality food, and it’s definitely worthwhile to come in here and see what we offer, but people don’t always notice us just driving by.”
It turns out, repairing a building issue earlier this summer also gave them the opportunity to enhance the curb appeal and vibrancy of the front of the restaurant simultaneously. Dotson said water was getting under portions of the concrete sidewalk, patio, and foundation at the front of the building. So when it would freeze, it would expand and raise the concrete, making it difficult to open the front door. Since that repair needed to be made anyway, Dotson and Bush looked at how they could better use that outdoor space and decided to add a larger patio with flexible outdoor seating, space for a small performance area, and generally a way to take the vibrancy and creativity that happens inside the restaurant and make it more visible outside.
“Every year we do a refresh, what can we do differently or better?” Dotson said. “We were under-utilizing the space out here. For people driving by, we said we need to make this more of a placemaking type of vibe where people can come in, have open performances like karaoke nights and things of that nature towards the end of the summer. Our main thing is being heavily interwoven with the culture and the people here because at the end of the day, that’s what drives us. So instead of just patching up the old patio, we decided to expand it.”
The Importance of Story
The Poké Bowl is a unique restaurant in Flint’s food ecosystem, and that’s by design. Dotson and Bush discovered poké-style cuisine while on a trip to Venice, California, in 2017 to shoot a music video.
Modern poké cuisine is common on the West Coast and in larger cities. Dishes often include different types of fish mixed with rice and vegetables, providing people with a quick, healthy meal. In an interview with the University of Michigan-Flint’s news team in 2023, Dotson noted that while the food style was common and popular in other parts of the country, it was completely new to them. They came back to Michigan and wanted to give that same experience to other Flint residents.
“The concept is Hawaiian and Japanese, and we try to tell people exactly where it came from, to really give an acknowledgement to the origin,” Dotson said. “We went to California and started trying to start a record label and stumbled upon poké while shooting our music video. Telling people the story, that inspires a lot of people to come in, people can relate to the fact we went out there to chase a dream and that led to a different dream.”
The menu has poké staples that include raw fish and seafood, but also has bowls that include chicken, tofu, different types of nachos, soup, and fruit bowls.
“People who would never have thought of eating raw fish or fresh sashimi-grade fish are like, ‘Okay, Poké Bowl is my spot. It’s a hidden gem,’” Dotson said. “And hidden gem is cool, but we wanna be a main gem.”
They’ve told their story in traditional ways, through interactions with customers, but also through a creative social media presence. They are active on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, where they share behind-the-scenes content from the business, customer reactions to trying poké style food for the first time, and much more.
“My brother has been a very avid TikToker lately,” Dotson said. “It has been paying off. We’ve had a lot of people lately say they’d never heard of us but they saw us on TikTok. We just got on there about a month ago. We’ve been doing videos we would think would be corny because we’re millennials. But people are actually eating this stuff up, they like it. We just try to put ourselves out there and find different ways to share our story and who we are, and that has resonated with people.”
A New Anchor Institution
The new patio, Dotson hopes, won’t just be an aesthetic improvement. He hopes it will be another way to build community in the University Avenue Corridor area. Their location is right between three neighborhoods, Mott Park, Carriage Town and Ballenger Park, that are within walking distance. There are also numerous summer festivals in those neighborhoods and downtown. He thinks the Poké Bowl’s space can add to that growing scene.
“We decided that since we have to expand the patio space, let’s beef this up, get some plants out there, set up some performances,” Dotson said. “What really inspired us is, like, PorchFest and things of that nature. We want to be able to expand that type of engagement from the community this way as well. Maybe we can have a PorchFest or something like that right here. We can hopefully base it off of some of the vibrations from Carriage Town and try to get some of my people from Ballenger Park and Mott Park and maybe we can meet in the middle right here at the Poké Bowl and make it a space.”
Dotson envisions eventually having open mic nights, video game tournaments, and other types of performances and entertainment at the space.
“We are just trying to figure out what we can do to become an anchor in the neighborhood,” Dotson said.
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