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Eater
3 days ago
- Eater
Why Seattleites Drive Two Hours for This Oyster Bar
There's no way around it, oysters are indulgences. Seattle has many great oyster bars, each with their own charms but all embodiments of some vision of luxury: The Walrus and the Carpenter is the pinnacle of laid-back 2010s hipster cool, Elliott's is a touristy waterfront paradise, Shuckers is all dark wood and old-school class. Oysters at these places are presented like works of art, their exposed bodies glistening and wet, framed by their craggy, primordial, endlessly photogenic shells. You do a little dance with lemon and acidic pink mignonette, maybe hot sauce in an eyedropper, slurp down the briny morsel, and place the shell back down on the plate of ice. Oyster bars aim for elegance because they have to cast a spell. You must walk in and see yourself as a carefree epicurean, so unconcerned with money, you don't bother asking about market price before airily ordering a dozen for the table. But there's another oyster fantasy, one that involves getting in a car and driving south on I-5 toward Tacoma. If you hit midday traffic, Google Maps will tell you to peel off onto 16 near the Tacoma Dome, cross the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and go up to Gig Harbor before turning west, toward the Olympic Peninsula. Car dealerships with American flags and signs for Costco gradually give way to evergreens and sky. The highway shrinks to two lanes, sometimes hemmed in on one side by trees and the other by water. You hit 101 and head north, skirting the edge of the Skokomish Nation Reservation and passing a tribal-owned casino and grocery store, along with some fireworks stands in various states of disrepair. Two hours and a whole world later, you can finally pull into the gravel parking lot at the Hama Hama Oyster Saloon, maybe Washington state's best oyster bar and certainly the one that's hardest to get to. The Oyster Saloon looks the kind of place humans build after a zombie apocalypse. There's a food truck, a little farm store, Adirondack chairs facing a gently burning wood fire. Most of the tables are under weather-beaten A-frame structures that shield them, partly, from the rain. On a sunny day, you get a panoramic view of the Hood Canal — not a canal but one of North America's few fjords — tree-lined hills across it, and, directly in front of you, the tide flats that constitute the Hama Hama oyster farm, the reason you're here. You probably know the name Hama Hama; the company's oysters are served and celebrated all over the West Coast, and sometimes elsewhere (a few are exported to Singapore). Oysters taste like the waters they grow in, and Hama Hamas are generally described as tasting clean, or green and cucumber-like. In his book The Essential Oyster , Rowan Jacobsen says the flavor is 'nettle soup, with lots of vibrant, herbaceous spring greens and briny sea stock.' The Blue Pool varietal, which is 'tumbled' in bags rather than grown on beaches, has a deeper cup and a slightly creamier flavor profile; Jacobsen calls it 'white miso-shiitake soup.' There's no better place to linger over Hama Hamas and Blue Pools than the saloon, wood smoke in your nose, looking out at the beach where, at night, Hama Hama workers in headlamps harvest oysters out of the shallow, cold water. It's a farm-to-table restaurant in the sense that you can see the (oyster) farm from the table. If you're an oyster person, it's a different vibe than you get at a city oyster bar — more rugged, wilder. It's a way to remove oysters from the manicured restaurant context you usually find them in and get closer to their briny source. If you're not an oyster person, sorry someone dragged you here. The menu is essentially all oysters: raw, marinated escabeche-style, and roasted with chipotle bourbon butter. The last one is what you get if you insist you don't like oysters — they are smoky-sweet and flaky rather than gooey. (There are also crabcakes, salads, and clams; kids can get a grilled cheese sandwich, and adventurous kids can add Douglas fir jelly.) Hama Hama is a family business in its sixth generation. Lissa James Monberg, the company's vice president of shellfish, has told the story countless times. Her mother's grandfather, Daniel Miller Robbins, bought this land in the 1890s to log it. The logging company did well until the Depression, then fell on hard times; at one point, Monberg says, the company was selling scrap metal so it could afford to pay taxes. The family was determined to hang on to this strip of land next to the Hood Canal — Monberg's grandfather 'couldn't let such a good trout stream get away from him,' she says. He sold Christmas trees, logs, iron, shrimp, whatever he could find. Then he tried oysters. The beach in front of the saloon is an ideal natural oyster farm, Monberg explains. On sunny summer days the tide flats absorb heat from the sun at low tide; when the tide comes back in, the water warms up. Without wind mixing the shallows with the colder, deeper water in the middle of the Hood Canal, the water on the tide flats stays warm. It's too hot and sunny — and it gets too cold at night — for the native Olympia oyster. But when Pacific oysters were brought from Japan to Puget Sound in the early 20th century, they flourished: That warm water is just what they need to spawn. Oysters make more oysters by spewing sperm and eggs into the water, which then form larvae. The larvae, if they're lucky and changes in the water temperature don't kill them, eventually settle down on a rock or an oyster shell and start forming a shell of their own. Monberg's family 'always worked with the naturally occurring reproduction,' she says, putting oyster shells out on the beach to 'recruit' larvae during the summer spawning season. She compares it to 'farming dandelions.' They manage the population by not harvesting all the oysters at once. 'It's more like a food forest than a modern industrial farm,' she says. 'You're just working with what's there to try to grow more food than would be there otherwise.' The Oyster Saloon was a natural outgrowth of the family's evolving business. The Hama Hama company got into oysters in the 1950s and opened a retail store next to the farm in the '70s, since locals kept dropping by looking to buy a half-gallon of bivalves. Inspired by Hog Island Oyster Company in Northern California, Hama Hama opened the Oyster Saloon in 2014. Initially, the saloon was just a few tables close to the store. During the pandemic lockdown era, the company expanded it by setting up more tables and building those A-frames. The Oyster Saloon has become wildly popular despite a seeming contradiction. Peak oyster season is in winter, and the saloon is open — but since it's entirely outdoors, diners have to huddle around half-sheltered heat lamps and contend with the wind and the rain. (Granted, this is some people's idea of a good time.) The Oyster Saloon is at its bucolic best in the summer, when oysters aren't traditionally eaten, as spawning changes their flavor. These days, however, people have discarded the old 'only eat oysters in months with an 'r'' rule, and on busy summer weekends the saloon serves 700 people a day, who eat around 300 dozen oysters. These are oyster-obsessed city folk from Seattle and Portland, hikers trekking around the nearby national park, bikers taking a break from roaring their Harleys down 101. (There's a rural-urban divide when it comes to oysters, according to Monberg: City folk like raw oysters. People who grew up out here on the peninsula prefer them cooked.) This popularity has made the saloon more central to Hama Hama's business than ever before. A family of loggers turned into a family of oyster farmers, turned into the owners of maybe the only true destination restaurant in Mason County, Washington. Would Hama Hama ever get more fully into the restaurant game, following the footsteps of Taylor Shellfish Farms, another regional seafood producer, which has three Seattle oyster bars? Taylor is doing a great job, says Hama Hama head chef Dillon Pennell, but Hama Hama doesn't want to do that. The Oyster Saloon isn't just a place to get oysters. 'It's air, it's the wood smoke,' says Pennell. 'I don't think we'd ever be very interested in sterilizing it to the point of shoehorning it into the bottom of a condo in Seattle... It would lose some of the spirit.' You can take the oyster off the beach. You can keep it chilled and damp until the moment comes to carefully, expertly shuck it so that its belly and mantle are unbroken, glistening, ready to be served. But maybe something is lost along the way to that citified oyster bar at the bottom of a condo complex, and maybe you have to drive out to Hama Hama again to remember what that was. See More:
Daily Mirror
15-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mirror
Inside tiny British corner shop frozen in time where Cadbury's bars cost 4p
A Cornish corner shop frozen in time since 1973 has become a living museum after its owner refused to switch from shillings. It's a nostalgic look at life pre-decimalisation, with vintage packaging, glass bottles, and forgotten treats like the Tunis cake Tucked away on a quiet street in Saltash, Cornwall, is a store unlike any other in Britain - a perfectly preserved corner shop frozen in the early 1970s, where shillings once jingled in customers' pockets and decimalisation was simply refused. The store, Elliott's, closed its doors in 1973 after owner Frank Elliott made a firm and final decision that he would not adapt to the new decimal currency introduced across the UK. Instead of changing with the times, Frank shuttered the grocery shop that had been in his family for generations. What he left behind is now a rare and nostalgic time capsule of British life before the modern retail era. Now run by 74-year-old retired teacher and volunteer Gerry Sweet, the shop has been lovingly maintained as a museum by the Tamar Protection Society, which Frank entrusted with the building shortly before his death in 1995 at the age of 98. READ MORE: UK train firms launch 'Clubcard' schemes with free tickets - but there's a catch The shop has been featured in Channel 5's new documentary The Year We Went Decimal that explored the decimalisation of British currency in 1971. Gerry, who has lived in Cornwall for 40 years, didn't set out to become a curator of social history - he just got 'fed up of talking to shop assistants' and decided to volunteer instead. 'When I first stepped inside the shop, it was like nothing I'd ever seen,' Gerry tells The Mirror. 'Everything was still in place - the original tins, packaging, advertising posters - even a jar of jam or two, untouched. It was like Frank had just stepped out for a moment.' Frank, remembered fondly by locals, had a well-known aversion to change. 'He wasn't interested in decimalisation,' Gerry explains. 'He had a poster up in the shop that read 'Stop Metric Madness'. He was already quite elderly at the time, and rather than deal with the changes, he decided to close up.' But Frank didn't just lock the door and walk away. He and his brother reportedly ate and drank their way through the remaining stock - carefully washing out empty tins and returning them to the shelves, giving today's visitors a hauntingly authentic view of a very different era. Inside the shop, visitors can see everything exactly as it was: Fry's chocolate rations, vintage starch packaging with Edwardian illustrations, glass soda bottles, and even a dusty but vibrant Tunis cake - a long-lost Christmas treat that is rarely remembered. 'There's no plastic, no self-checkouts, no sell-by dates. It's a glimpse into a slower, simpler time,' Gerry says. 'People only bought what they could afford. Packaging was recyclable, drinks came in glass bottles that you returned, and nothing was wasted.' Despite the passage of time, nothing new is brought into the store, due to preservation rules. Restoration is kept minimal, with original items retained even if they're a little worse for wear. 'We try to keep everything as it was. We only remove something if absolutely necessary, and even then, we all have to agree.' Visitors often react with disbelief. 'Most people walk in and just say 'Wow'. You don't see something like this anywhere else.' As for the future, Gerry is passionate about ensuring Frank's legacy lives on. With school groups and local history tours frequently visiting, he hopes younger generations can learn something from a shop that refused to modernise - and in doing so, became a living piece of British history. 'It teaches us about the value of things, the importance of community, and what shopping used to be like before barcodes and online shopping carts,' he says. 'It's social history, not just nostalgia.' And, he adds, 'Where else can you still find a tube of Polos for two pence?' Items you can find in the shop 1968: Fry's Cocoa half pound tin cost 2/3 [2 shillings 3 pennies] - now 11p 1955 Chiver's Olde English Marmalade 1 lb cost 1/5 [1 sh 5 pennies] - now 7p 1955 Raspberry Jam 1 lb cost 1/10 [1 sh 10 pennies] - now 9 p 1955 Canned peas cost 1/1 [1 shilling 1 penny] -.now 5 p 1955 canned carrots 10 cost 1/2 pennies -.now 4p 1969 Cadbury Milk chocolate Fruit and nut bar cost 9d [9 pennies] - now 4p 1969 1 lb box Roses Chocolates cost 1/9 [1 shilling 9 pennies] - now 9p 1957 Cadbury's Drinking Chocolate 1/2 lb tin cost 1/9 [1 shilling 9 pennies] - now 9p 1959 Bordeaux Rouge Wine cost 7/- [7 shillings] - now 35p 1959 Martell Brandy cost 46/ [46 shillings] - now £2.30
