Sweetfin wants to be about a lot more than poké.
Marking its 10-year anniversary, the Los Angeles-based fast-casual chain is launching an overhaul of its menu, which has long been focused on Hawaiian-inspired poké bowls. Now, for the first time, Sweetfin is planning to add more bowls featuring proteins like cooked salmon, roasted chicken and tri-tip, positioning the menu as “California-Asian.”
And the brand has brought in a celebrated California chef to help with that effort.
Sweetfin has tapped the Michelin-starred chef Daniel Patterson to create several new warm bowls, which will debut at a flagship unit in Los Angeles next week, and later this year will roll out across the 15-unit chain.
Patterson is known for high-end restaurants like Coi in San Francisco (which closed in 2022), and as a former partner in Alta Adams in Los Angeles. He also famously partnered with Roy Choi on the ill-fated experiment with healthy fast food, Locol.
For Sweetfin, Patterson has created a line of warm bowls ranging in price from about $16 to $18, including:
A Spicy Jidori Chicken Grain bowl with soy-miso roasted chicken, gochujang, roasted broccoli, sesame-ginger slaw and a spicy, crunchy seed-and-nut mix, cilantro and scallions, served over white rice;
A Miso-Roasted Salmon bowl with avocado, seaweed-cucumber salad, pickled carrot, edamame and yuzu kosho mayo on brown rice;
The new salmon bowl at Sweetfin. | Photo courtesy of Sweetfin/Jakob Layman.
And a Steak Bowl with roasted Japanese sweet potato, pickled red onion, scallions and arugula served with quinoa and a signature steak sauce.
The menu also includes new salads, like a Chopped Salad with tahini-sesame-ginger dressing; a Crispy Rice Salad with a chili vinaigrette; and a Kale and Seaweed Salad with creamy lemon-white soy-miso-tofu dressing. Those salads can be topped with proteins like the miso salmon, roasted chicken, tri-tip or tofu.
Seth Cohen, Sweetfin’s co-founder, said poké will remain part of the brand’s core competency. But guests have been asking for more ways to enjoy the brand and still have the same flavors with other proteins.
For poké concepts, the focus on raw fish can spark a veto vote for some consumers, he said.
The menu change aims to do two things, said Cohen.
“We’re increasing the frequency of our current guests. So those are the guests that enjoy our flavors but are not wanting to eat raw as frequently as we’d like them to,” he said.
“And secondarily, but probably more importantly, we’re opening the concept to a whole new group of diners. And those are people that, again, either don’t want to eat raw or don’t eat raw fish, for whatever particular reason that is, while maintaining the same exact sort of flavor profiles of Japanese and Asian cuisine, with California produce and then all of the brand culinary DNA tenets that we’ve maintained in the past.”
What won’t change is the gluten-free emphasis, and cooking in house, he said.
With the move, however, Sweetfin has also cut about 30% to 40% of the menu to focus on what sells well and double down on quality, he said.
Base options, which included several types of rice and kelp noodles, have been reduced from six to four, for example, and the 30 toppings will be reduced to about 20.
There are the new additions, like the Japanese sweet potato and eggplant, and the broccoli with gochujang, for example.
Japanese sweet potato at Sweetfin. | Photo courtesy of Sweetfin/Jakob Layman.
“But this is a big change for us, in terms of what the composition of the menu looks like and the type of diners that we feel like we’re going to be able to attract,” Cohen said.
The move also will put Sweetfin more squarely in the same sandbox as other fast-casual bowl concepts, like Sweetgreen, Cava and Chipotle.
Fast-casual concepts had a difficult 2025, with sales and traffic slipping across those leading brands.
Cohen said Sweetfin is competing for the same customer base. But the poké offering still offers a point of differentiation for the brand, and now Patterson’s dishes bring a more-elevated option that he hopes will drive new traffic.
“We’re really excited to compete because we’re really confident in the quality of product that we’re bringing to the market,” Cohen said. “Especially in a market like Southern California, where you have grocery stores who have hot bars charging $38 per salmon plate, we think we can bring a better-quality product to the market at half the price.”
Sweetfin ended 2024 with sales of $19.4 million, up 4.3%, according to data from Technomic, a Restaurant Business sister brand. The company ended that year with 16 units, and an average-unit volume of $1.2 million.
The much-larger poké competitor Pokeworks ended 2024 with 67 units and sales of nearly $62 million, a 3.6% increase.
Unlike Sweetfin, however, Pokeworks is a franchise brand.
But Cohen said Sweetfin is not considering franchising currently.
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