Izna Poke Plus

Izna Poke Plus runs a longer menu than its name suggests. The salmon and tuna bowls are there, built on sushi rice the way the poke format demands — but so are bulgogi beef, spicy stir-fried pork, bibimbap, a hoedeopbap that treats sashimi like a Korean rice bowl, and a full section of warm udon for the days a cold bowl is the wrong call. The University Avenue West counter near the University of Waterloo is less a single-idea poke shop than a small Korean-Japanese kitchen that happens to lead with fish. A table can walk in wanting four different meals and still order off one short menu.

The Salmon Bowl is the clearest first order and the truest read on the kitchen: salmon over sushi rice with avocado, mixed greens, cucumber, red pepper, corn, edamame, sweet onion, seaweed salad, spicy mayo, and house soy. The Salmon & Tuna Bowl runs the same vegetable-heavy build with both fish. For anyone who wants the fish cooked rather than raw, the BBQ'd Teriyaki Seared salmon — BTS on the menu — arrives glazed with teriyaki and finished with tempura bits, green onion, and roasted seaweed, the richest bowl on the board. The Korean rice bowls reach further still: bulgogi and spicy pork, a bibimbap crowned with egg, an unagi bowl built on barbecued eel. Vegetarians get a Tofu Bowl that keeps every topping but the fish.

Beyond the signatures, the lineup keeps widening. The Grilled Chicken Protein Bowl swaps fish for grilled chicken breast, for diners who want the build without anything raw; the Seafood Trio piles lobster, shrimp, and kani over rice for a splurge; the Happy Shrimp Bowl runs on shrimp tempura. Sides do the quiet supporting work — edamame, kimchi, seaweed salad, a bowl of miso soup — the small add-ons that round a single bowl into a fuller meal.

What separates Izna from a standard poke or sushi counter is how far the Korean accents go. Gochujang, sesame oil, and chogochujang run across the rice bowls, and the hoedeopbap and bibimbap are full Korean dishes rather than poke wearing a Korean garnish. The udon section pulls in the other direction: fried tofu, oden fish cake, chicken, bulgogi, tempura shrimp, and tonkatsu in seafood broth give the menu a hot, brothy register for colder months. Between them, the menu covers raw and cooked, hot and cold, fish and meat and tofu — range a single-format poke shop rarely bothers to carry.

The format is built for how a campus neighbourhood actually eats. Izna keeps the same hours every day, eleven in the morning to nine at night, which makes it a dependable answer for a between-class lunch or a late weeknight dinner with no reservation involved. Takeout and delivery are first-class rather than afterthoughts; a good share of the day's bowls never see a table. Larger orders are accounted for too: the kitchen asks groups ordering more than ten bowls to call ahead, the kind of request that keeps an office lunch or a study-group pickup from outrunning the fish-and-rice pacing at the line.

Since opening in 2021, Izna has settled into the role its menu was built for: the counter a group reaches for when nobody can agree on one cuisine. The Korean bowls and the warm noodles are what keep it from blurring into every other poke shop that opened in the same wave. One diner orders a clean salmon bowl, another bulgogi over rice, a third a bowl of tonkatsu udon — and a few minutes from the University of Waterloo, all three leave fed off the same short menu.