Three Food Trends Rolled into One at New CDN Spot

An Eater tipster says that new lunch spot Moushi has quietly popped open on Decarie Boulevard in Cote-des-Neiges, serving up a mixed bag of poke bowls (a Hawaiian raw fish salad), pseudo-burrito pseudo-sushi wraps, and a seemingly endless list of unanswered questions.

Those questions include: is the combination of poke, sushi and burrito elements an example of food trend overkill? What are the semantic rules around using the word burrito to describe something that comes in wrap form but otherwise contains no burrito-like elements such as beans or tortillas? Why open a restaurant in almost the same location as Sushi Mou Shi, and give it an almost identical name? Are they trying to usurp Sushi Mou Shi’s old Yelp and Zomato reviews? Is the Poke fad witnessed elsewhere around North America finally taking hold in a city typically slow to adapt to food trends from the Asia-Pacific region? (Apparently so, given Poke Bar’s presence downtown and the forthcoming Koa Lua.)

To their credit, Moushi haven’t let their triple-fusion concept result in a lengthy and convoluted menu (shown below). There are just eight options, centred around crab, salmon, tuna, chicken and vegetarian, and customers decide whether they want their dish in “burrito” or poke bowl form, something Moushi’s web site deems “the biggest choice of your life”, without any apparent irony.

The arrival of Moushi seems rather sudden — the restaurant had zero social media presence before yesterday, when it seems to have open. That’s possibly a missed opportunity to leverage the #foodie and #cleaneating trendiness of poke and hype up the masses. The lack of publicity aside, it seems Moushi is anticipating success, as their site promises more locations opening soon.

CORRECTION — A previous version of this article stated that Sushi Mou Shi on Decarie Boulevard had closed. Sushi Mou Shi is in fact still open.