The Hama Hama Oyster Saloon May Be Washington State’s Best Oyster Bar | Eater Seattle
"I end up after a long, scenic drive south from Seattle — peeling off I-5 near the Tacoma Dome, crossing the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and heading toward Gig Harbor — in a gravel parking lot at the Hama Hama Oyster Saloon, maybe Washington state's best oyster bar and certainly the hardest to get to. The saloon looks like something humans would build after a zombie apocalypse: a food truck, a little farm store, Adirondack chairs by a wood fire, and weather‑beaten A-frames over most tables, with a panoramic view of Hood Canal and the tide flats that are the actual Hama Hama oyster farm. Their oysters are famous up and down the West Coast (a few are even exported to Singapore) and taste of the water they grow in — generally described as clean, green, and cucumber-like; Rowan Jacobsen calls the flavor “nettle soup” and describes the Blue Pool varietal (tumbled in bags) as having a deeper cup and a creamier, “white miso‑shiitake soup” quality. It’s literal farm-to-table — wood smoke in your nose as workers in headlamps harvest oysters at night — and the menu is essentially oysters (raw, escabeche-style marinated, and roasted with chipotle bourbon butter for people who insist they “don’t like oysters”), plus a few items like crabcakes, salads, clams, and kids’ grilled cheese (with an adventurous option of Douglas fir jelly). Hama Hama is a sixth‑generation family business that pivoted from logging to oyster farming, using natural recruitment techniques (putting shells out to “recruit” larvae) and managing beds like a food forest; the company got into oysters in the 1950s, opened a retail store in the 1970s, and launched the Oyster Saloon in 2014, expanding it during the pandemic. The saloon’s fully outdoor, half‑sheltered setup means diners huddle around heat lamps in winter and the place hums in summer (on busy weekends serving hundreds of people and dozens of dozens of oysters), and its head chef and family insist they wouldn’t sterilize that air-and-wood-smoke spirit by trying to transplant it into a city condo." - Harry Cheadle
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