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Toronto Sun
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Toronto Sun
Lab-grown salmon set to hit the menu at hot Seattle oyster bar
Published Jul 19, 2025 • 3 minute read Raw salmon fillets are pictured in this stock photo. Photo by stock photo / Getty Images Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page. Seattle restaurant The Walrus and the Carpenter is known for its fresh oysters that showcase the terroir — or more accurately, merroir — of the waters in which they were raised. But starting in August, the restaurant will be serving fish that doesn't have a merroir at all because it's been grown from cells in a lab. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account The Walrus and the Carpenter will be the third restaurant in the world to serve startup Wildtype's lab-grown salmon. Renee Erickson, the James Beard Award-winning chef behind the restaurant, first came across lab-raised fish a few years ago. Her first reaction, which she shared at Bloomberg Green Seattle this week: 'Most people's perception of it is weird, and it is weird.' Wildtype takes cells from Pacific salmon that are then grown in tanks that look akin to those used to brew beer. The company adds a mix of nutrients similar to what wild fish eat. The cells are harvested and then mixed with other ingredients to make filets that look just like salmon. The company received US Food and Drug Administration clearance in June, making it the first lab-raised seafood to be deemed safe for public consumption. Your noon-hour look at what's happening in Toronto and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. The cultivated salmon is designed to be served raw, cured or smoked. Two places are already serving it. Kann, which specializes in Haitian food in Portland, Oregon, plates it with grilled watermelon and pickled strawberries. Meanwhile, OTOKO in Austin serves it as part of a Japanese omakase. Erickson is currently planning to serve the fish in a leche de tigre, a marinade used in South American ceviche. Farm-raised salmon is a multi-billion-dollar business, but it takes a heavy toll on the environment. Salmon are fed fish meal, which leads to overfishing of smaller species. Fish can also escape farms, spreading diseases to wild populations. Wild salmon, meanwhile, are under threat from issues including unsustainable catches and rising ocean and river temperatures. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Lab-raised fish sidestep these issues, though cultivating cells is an energy-intensive process. Some research into other types of cultivated meat has found emissions could be higher than farm-raised counterparts, though it remains a burgeoning area of research. Wildtype's fish has a lower carbon impact than farm-raised and wild-caught fish, according to an analysis the company shared with Bloomberg Green, though co-founders Arye Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck stressed it's a best guess based on limited scale and the company would revisit the analysis as it grows. Lab-grown meat has faced opposition. Seven states have banned the sale of it and a dozen more are considering bans, according to an analysis compiled by BloombergNEF. That includes a ban in Texas, where OTOKO is based, that goes into effect in September. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. The company will pull its fish from the menu to comply, though 'we did not intend this to be a limited-time offer,' said Kolbeck, who is also chief executive officer. Wildtype currently has the capacity to supply 50 restaurants 'if we're super efficient,' and will soon announce two more venues adding its salmon to the menu in San Francisco and Washington, DC. The fish also remains expensive. Erickson said Wildtype's salmon currently runs about $190 per pound. That makes it anywhere from four to six times more expensive than sushi-grade salmon. Other lab-grown meats have failed to take off. Good Meat and Upside Foods have received FDA approval for their chicken, but aren't permanently on the menu anywhere. Erickson said she hopes that lab-grown fish can become more widespread. 'If you get a sushi bowl or poke bowl, most people don't know or care where that fish comes from at all, and you probably don't want to know,' she said. 'Replacing some of that with something not causing damage like I've seen here in the Northwest — that would be amazing.' Read More MMA Toronto & GTA Toronto Raptors Tennis Letters
Eater
07-07-2025
- 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:
