For the past five years, Kelsey Sachi Lee has sold seafood to some of the city's best restaurants. Now he's opening up to the public with weekly Instagram releases and dishing out hits from the back of his car.
Lee still supplies fish to some of the city's top chefs, like Ari Kolender of Found Oyster and Queen's Raw Bar & Grill, but with his new online-only venture, Dover Sole Market, he's offering weekend ahi poke pickups in parking lots in Koreatown and Sherman Oaks in an ode to his Oahu upbringing.
“It was literally our deli,” he said of the island's poketiendas. “We would go to the supermarket and, just like we would buy eggs, milk, vegetables or cereals, 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 I'm reconnecting with the home I didn't know I missed so much.”
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Their shoyu uses three varieties of soybeans, plus bonito and sugar, which form a thin, sweet-salty coating for the ruby-red ahi. Lee found the same variety of sweet onion grown in Hawaii (although his is grown in Texas), which he slices thinly and mixes with tuna and green onion. To eat, everything is sprinkled with shoyu and sprinkled with Hawaiian salt made by her aunt. For spicy tuna, masago clings to thick, buttery tuna chunks topped with Sriracha, mayonnaise, and sesame oil.
Lee announces the releases via Dover Sole Market's Instagram stories on Wednesday or Thursday for pickup on Saturday and Sunday. Some guests order big eye ahi every weekend. Others are new, curious faces who have seen posts on social media. Prices vary each week, depending on the market, but generally range between $35 and $40 per pound. There is no rice or seaweed salad, just fish, which highlights the quality of the ahi.
“I think the right people will appreciate that this is a piece that would be sold at a fish market, because a fish market wants to show off its quality,” Lee said. “You really can't go wrong if you let that be the determining factor.”
Each week, Lee makes three calls with his Oahu ahi buyer, a fisherman: one to establish his clients' goals and Lee's ideal number of orders, another to discuss how the week's catch is shaping up, and a third to decide which tuna to buy.
The buyer then packs up the package and sends it to Los Angeles, where Lee is waiting at the airport in his Lexus hatchback. Tuna, which sometimes weigh up to 200 pounds, can leave your car four inches closer to the ground once loaded, Lee says. He takes it to his ghost kitchen in North Hollywood, where he breaks it down and makes poke in an ode to his upbringing.
Lee grew up on Oahu, where his family ate fresh poke for dinner at least once a week. He lived there until he went to college in Washington and, having grown up with affordable poke, made do by putting Pike's Place smoked salmon over microwave-safe rice in his dorm room.
Kelsey Sachi Lee of Dover Sole Market giving a push from the back of her car in a Koreatown parking lot on Saturday, May 2, 2026.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
In 2016, he moved to Los Angeles and studied for the LSAT, but deciding that law school wasn't the right choice, he found a job on Craigslist running an izakaya in California. It was MTN, the Gjelina Group's Japanese restaurant in Venice, run by chef Travis Lett. It was here that he learned to appreciate produce and organized the restaurant's payroll as quickly as possible so he would have free time to follow his chefs around the farmers' market.
“After I'd been there for a while, I thought, 'Is someone doing this with seafood?'” he said.
To find the answer, he joined Joint Seafood, the dry-aged fish temple founded by fishmonger Liwei Liao in Sherman Oaks, where he sold fish to some of the city's top chefs. In 2023 he left to help launch San Francisco's Four Star Seafood branch in Los Angeles, but in late 2025 he felt the call to strike out on his own.
Shoyu ahi orders include Hawaiian salt and shoyu on the side so as not to cure the fish before eating.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
On a recent trip to Hawaii he attended a live fish market, bought a fish and asked some friends if they wanted poke. It took off immediately. In February, it officially launched Dover Sole Market.
Now he sells up to 70 pounds of poke in a weekend, and much of his clientele gets it through word of mouth.
Regular customers and restaurant wholesale accounts can unlock a more curated, hassle-free list of more limited quantities of seafood, including uni, opah, ikura, live scallops, Kauai head shrimp, swordfish and snapper. Lee sources from his buyer in Hawaii, as well as fishermen in Los Angeles and a buyer in Japan, who shops at Tokyo's Toyosu fish market twice a week.
Some of these more curated orders may include tutorials from Lee on how to break down a whole fish because he hopes that more customer engagement with ingredients, not less, is the future of reverent, sustainable food practices.
“Once you do those kinds of things at home, you gain appreciation, trust and respect for that product,” Lee said. “I know some people think that portioning halibut is what will get more people to buy it, but I actually think it's the opposite. I don't think we need to coddle the consumer that much. I think people want to know.”
