For the last five years Kelsey Sachi Lee sold seafood to some of the city’s top restaurants. Now she’s opening her orders to the public with weekly Instagram drops — and handing off poke from the back of her car.
Lee still sources fish for some of the city’s most prominent chefs, such as Ari Kolender of Found Oyster and Queen’s Raw Bar & Grill, but with her new, online-only venture, Dover Sole Market, she’s offering weekend ahi poke pickups in parking lots in Koreatown and Sherman Oaks in an ode to her upbringing on Oahu.
“It was literally our deli,” she said of the island’s poke shops. “We would go to the grocery store, and just like you’d buy eggs, milk, vegetables or cereal, that was a stop. It was part of the diet … the first time I had my shoyu [ahi] I started crying because it reminded me of home. This is almost like me reconnecting with the home I didn’t know that I missed so much.”
Her shoyu uses three varieties of soy, plus bonito and sugar, which build a thin, sweet-savory coating for the ruby-red ahi. Lee found the same variety of sweet onion grown in Hawaii (though hers is grown in Texas), which she thinly slices and tosses with tuna and green onion. To eat, it’s all drizzled with the shoyu and sprinkled with Hawaiian salt made by her aunt. For the spicy tuna, masago clings to thick, buttery pieces of tuna coated in Sriracha, mayonnaise and sesame oil.
Lee announces the drops via Dover Sole Market’s Instagram stories Wednesday or Thursday for Saturday and Sunday pickup. Some guests order big-eye ahi every weekend. Others are new, curious faces who’ve seen posts trickle out over social media. Prices vary each week, depending on the market, but usually run $35 to $40 per pound. There is no rice, no seaweed salad — simply the fish — which spotlights the ahi’s quality.
“I think that the right people will appreciate that this is a poke that a fish market would sell, because a fish market wants to show off its quality,” Lee said. “You really can’t go wrong with it if you let that be the driving factor.”
Each week Lee takes three calls with her Oahu ahi buyer, a fisherman himself: one to establish her clients’ goals and Lee’s ideal number of poke orders, another to discuss how the week’s catches are shaping up, and a third to pull the trigger on which tuna to purchase.
The buyer then packs the poke and ships it to Los Angeles, where Lee is waiting at the airport with her Lexus hatchback. The tuna — sometimes weighing as much as 200 pounds — can drop her car four inches closer to the ground once loaded, Lee says. She hauls it to her ghost kitchen in North Hollywood, where she breaks it down and prepares poke in an ode to her upbringing.
Lee was raised on Oahu, where her family dined on fresh poke at least once a week. She lived there until she left for college in Washington and, having grown up on accessible poke, made do by laying Pike’s Place smoked salmon atop microwaveable rice in her dorm room.
In 2016 she moved to Los Angeles and studied for the LSAT, but deciding that law school wasn’t the right fit, found a job listing on Craigslist to manage a California izakaya. It was MTN, the Gjelina Group’s Japanese Venice restaurant helmed by chef Travis Lett. It was here she learned to appreciate produce, organizing the restaurant’s payroll as fast as possible to free up her time to follow its chefs around the farmers market.
“Having been there for a little while, I was like, ‘Is anyone doing this for seafood?’” she said.
To find the answer she joined the Joint Seafood, fishmonger Liwei Liao’s Sherman Oaks-founded temple to dry-aged fish, where she sold fish to some of the city’s most prominent chefs. In 2023 she left to help launch the L.A. branch of San Francisco’s Four Star Seafood, but in late 2025 felt a calling to strike out on her own.
On a recent trip to Hawaii she attended a live-fish market, purchased a fish and asked some friends whether they might want poke. It took off immediately. In February, she officially launched Dover Sole Market.
Now she sells as much as 70 pounds of poke in a weekend, and much of her clientele is garnered by word of mouth.
Regulars and restaurant wholesale accounts can unlock a more curated, non-poke list of more-limited quantities of seafood, including uni, opah, ikura, live scallops, Kauai head-on shrimp, swordfish and snapper. Lee sources from her buyer in Hawaii as well as L.A. fishermen, and a buyer in Japan, who purchases from Tokyo’s Toyosu Fish Market twice a week.
Some of these more curated orders can involve tutorials by Lee on how to break down a whole fish because she hopes that more customer involvement with ingredients — and not less — is the future of sustainable and reverent foodways.
“Once you do that kind of thing at home, you gain an appreciation and a trust and respect for that product,” Lee said. “I know some people think that portioning out halibut is what’s going to get more people to buy it, but I actually think it’s the opposite. I don’t think that we need to baby the consumer so much. I think that people want to know.”
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