The line forms before the door opens. It’s not long, usually — five or six people on a Tuesday, more on a weekend — but it tells you something. Seattle has no shortage of places to eat oysters, and yet people stand on a sidewalk on Melrose Avenue rather than just going somewhere else. That’s a meaningful data point.
Taylor Shellfish Farms has been growing oysters on Puget Sound since 1890, which is the kind of history that could easily become a marketing cudgel. It hasn’t, at least not here. The Capitol Hill shop operates like a working oyster bar that knows what it’s doing and mostly leaves you alone to eat. The space is small and utilitarian — picnic table seating, concrete floors, a chalkboard menu — and smells exactly like low tide in the best possible way.
The oysters are the obvious move, and you should make it. On any given day there are four to six varieties on the menu, all farmed by Taylor at different Puget Sound and Pacific Coast sites: Shigoku, Totten Inlet Virginica, Kumamoto if you’re lucky, maybe a West Coast Pacific from somewhere further up the coast. Each variety gets a brief tasting note on the chalkboard — brine level, finish, texture — which sounds pretentious until you realize you’re about to spend money on something you can’t taste before ordering, so the note earns its place. A dozen runs roughly $24 to $30 depending on variety. Half-dozen pricing makes it easy to try two or three kinds side by side, which is exactly what you should do if you’ve never noticed that oysters actually taste different from one another.
Beyond raw oysters, there’s a rotating cast of other shellfish: Manila clams, Dungeness crab when it’s in season, geoduck if you want to explain to your dining companion what geoduck is. There are a handful of cooked preparations — steamed clams with butter and white wine, a crab roll that shows up and disappears depending on the season — and they’re solid, but they’re not the point. The point is the raw bar and the mignonette and a cold beer or a crisp white from the short drinks list.
A word about the condiments: the house cocktail sauce is fine, the mignonette is better, but the cleanest way to eat a Taylor oyster is a few drops of lemon and nothing else. Get the mignonette anyway. It’s the kind of small thing done well that you notice.
What makes the Capitol Hill location work specifically — over, say, the Melrose Market location half a block away, which is also good — is that it has a slightly more relaxed walk-up energy. You can eat standing at a tall counter facing the window, watch the foot traffic on Melrose, and finish a half-dozen Shigokus in about twelve minutes before going back to whatever your afternoon requires. It doesn’t demand more of you than that.
Go on a weekday if you have the option. Go hungry but not ravenous — this is grazing food, not a meal designed to make you full. Bring cash or a card, because they take both. And accept that you’ll probably want another half-dozen before you’re done, which was the plan all along.
