What's your context for acai? I've just known them to be a fruit.
I'm Brazilian, lived in Brazil for about half my life. I drank a lot of açai growing up by the beach in Rio. Then I moved back to the U.S. for college, and a few years into that açai became the new fad super berry. When I first heard a juice shop had açai, it was some juice shop in a mall inside of a shoe store. I was stoked, since açai was practically nonexistent in the U.S. up until then.
I decide to try a smoothie, and to my surprise it has fucking APPLE JUICE in it. What? No no, that's not how you make this, I thought. So I kindly asked the dude behind the counter if he could just make it for me with the açai, guaraná, and banana. He looked at me like I was insane, and said that's now how it's made and he didn't know what guaraná was, and it's just açai, apple juice, and some other handful of ingredients I can't recall. I asked if in that case he could just do banana, açai, and ice. Again, no, sorry, they can't prepare it that way.
So my dreams ended there. Then fast forward through the last nearly a decade, and getting açai almost ANYWHERE at these trendy "bowl" places (açai IS in fact often served in a bowl in Brazil, but that's generally the larger portion option), and it comes topped with about half a dozen to a dozen different things and blended with a million juices. Not only that, but just about every place I've been to is lacking the actual classic and delicious preparation from where it originated, Brazil. I even once found an açai food truck in SF and tried to order it classically, but was shot down. So the owner came over to have a chat since he had heard I was brazilian and his partner who owned the truck with him was brazilian too. Turns out, to sell shit in the U.S., it helps to spin it with a bunch of extra stuff on top. Just the plain jane, delicious, fruity, tarty, sweet and somewhat earthy flavor of açai in its traditional preparation won't cut it.
Anyways, my rant is over, but it's just of the same nature as what is being done with poke. People want to take something simple and delicious and fuck it with a million different necessary modifications. I think that's fine as long as you also give people who want the dish in its original preparation an option of ordering that, but most places simply think what they're doing is "better" than where the dish/whatever came from, and it's usually not.
Calm your tots boo
If it was chocolate or pizza we'd have your back but ain't nobody got time for dry ass Acai.
Dry? : O
It's supposed to look like this:
_/¯