Latest news with #RowanJacobsen
Eater
5 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:
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Healing Rays and Universe-Destroying Quantum Bubbles
We flock to beaches for it, cats and other animals bask in it, the quality of photographs lives and dies by it, and a person's mood (and vitamin D level) gets a boost from it. Although it has known risks, sunlight also seems to hold immense restorative value. Now scientists are finding the sun's rays could truly help to quash some autoimmune diseases. In our cover story, journalist Rowan Jacobsen introduces us to Kathy Reagan Young, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in 2008 and took up phototherapy relatively recently. She stands in front of a light box every morning, her torso engulfed in ultraviolet rays for just minutes at a time. Since starting the therapy, her brain fog and fatigue have nearly vanished in what Young calls a 'UV-fueled rebirth.' In this hopeful feature, Jacobsen also meets with scientists who are trying to figure out how UV light calms a person's immune system. Advocates say a better understanding of this process could lead to 'an Ozempic for autoimmunity,' he writes, referring to the blockbuster weight-loss drug. Rather than taking in warming sunbeams, some researchers want to repel them and turn down global temperatures by refreezing a swath of Arctic ice as big as the combined area of Texas and New Mexico. The gargantuan geoengineering project would require half a million underwater drones to pull water from below the melting ice cap and spray it onto the surface to freeze. Climate journalist Alec Luhn recounts his visit to an Inuit village in northern Canada where scientists are testing out the ice-thickening technique. As with all geoengineering ideas, he finds, there's no guarantee this scheme will work or way to know for certain whether there will be negative consequences. But polar scientists who spoke to Luhn say humanity needs a stopgap until the world can wean itself off greenhouse-gas-emitting coal, oil and natural gas. The drive to find answers is what propels many scientists. One nagging question remains: Where did we come from? Now cutting-edge radio astronomy is helping cosmologists peer back in time to the very start of the universe, when only Hula-Hooping particles existed. No moon. No Earth. No Milky Way. No light. Scientific American contributor Rebecca Boyle eloquently describes exciting new telescopes and experiments aimed at detecting signals from the wriggling atoms spilling out of these so-called cosmic dark ages. In addition to learning how the universe took shape, scientists hope to get intel on how the first light was released and the first galaxies formed. [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] Physicist Matthew von Hippel looks not at the birth of the universe but at its destruction, outlining a disastrous world-ending scenario that makes asteroid strikes and Earth-colliding black holes look like kid stuff. Called vacuum decay, this apocalyptic event would result from the emergence of a new quantum state. Here's how: The value of the Higgs field that pervades all of space would have to increase—something physicists liken to rolling a boulder up a hill. The field change would manifest in a quantum bubble, which, if big enough, could expand at the speed of light, ultimately making matter—and therefore life—impossible. Scientists had assumed that all major renovations to our genomes had happened long ago and that any recent evolutionary changes were few and far between. But advances in DNA-sequencing technology have revealed that even in recent millennia, humans have continued to evolve in substantive ways. These changes helped us to conquer every corner of Earth, writes journalist Kermit Pattison. 'We are like rats or cockroaches—extremely adaptable,' says one scientist who spoke with Pattison. If you look up 'mitochondria' in a biology textbook, you'll find a definition that is some variation of 'powerhouses of the cell.' But accumulating research shows these organelles are also social beings that orchestrate the inner workings of the cell; they even communicate with and help one another. Of course, when mitochondria malfunction, diseases can ensue. Behavioral neuroscientist Martin Picard's passionate profile of mitochondria in this issue gave me a lesson in not only the value of basic science but also the wonders of life.
Scientific American
20-05-2025
- Health
- Scientific American
Healing Rays and Universe-Destroying Quantum Bubbles
We flock to beaches for it, cats and other animals bask in it, the quality of photographs lives and dies by it, and a person's mood (and vitamin D level) gets a boost from it. Although it has known risks, sunlight also seems to hold immense restorative value. Now scientists are finding the sun's rays could truly help to quash some autoimmune diseases. In our cover story, journalist Rowan Jacobsen introduces us to Kathy Reagan Young, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in 2008 and took up phototherapy relatively recently. She stands in front of a light box every morning, her torso engulfed in ultraviolet rays for just minutes at a time. Since starting the therapy, her brain fog and fatigue have nearly vanished in what Young calls a 'UV-fueled rebirth.' In this hopeful feature, Jacobsen also meets with scientists who are trying to figure out how UV light calms a person's immune system. Advocates say a better understanding of this process could lead to 'an Ozempic for autoimmunity,' he writes, referring to the blockbuster weight-loss drug. Rather than taking in warming sunbeams, some researchers want to repel them and turn down global temperatures by refreezing a swath of Arctic ice as big as the combined area of Texas and New Mexico. The gargantuan geoengineering project would require half a million underwater drones to pull water from below the melting ice cap and spray it onto the surface to freeze. Climate journalist Alec Luhn recounts his visit to an Inuit village in northern Canada where scientists are testing out the ice-thickening technique. As with all geoengineering ideas, he finds, there's no guarantee this scheme will work or way to know for certain whether there will be negative consequences. But polar scientists who spoke to Luhn say humanity needs a stopgap until the world can wean itself off greenhouse-gas-emitting coal, oil and natural gas. The drive to find answers is what propels many scientists. One nagging question remains: Where did we come from? Now cutting-edge radio astronomy is helping cosmologists peer back in time to the very start of the universe, when only Hula-Hooping particles existed. No moon. No Earth. No Milky Way. No light. Scientific American contributor Rebecca Boyle eloquently describes exciting new telescopes and experiments aimed at detecting signals from the wriggling atoms spilling out of these so-called cosmic dark ages. In addition to learning how the universe took shape, scientists hope to get intel on how the first light was released and the first galaxies formed. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Physicist Matthew von Hippel looks not at the birth of the universe but at its destruction, outlining a disastrous world-ending scenario that makes asteroid strikes and Earth-colliding black holes look like kid stuff. Called vacuum decay, this apocalyptic event would result from the emergence of a new quantum state. Here's how: The value of the Higgs field that pervades all of space would have to increase—something physicists liken to rolling a boulder up a hill. The field change would manifest in a quantum bubble, which, if big enough, could expand at the speed of light, ultimately making matter—and therefore life—impossible. Scientists had assumed that all major renovations to our genomes had happened long ago and that any recent evolutionary changes were few and far between. But advances in DNA-sequencing technology have revealed that even in recent millennia, humans have continued to evolve in substantive ways. These changes helped us to conquer every corner of Earth, writes journalist Kermit Pattison. 'We are like rats or cockroaches—extremely adaptable,' says one scientist who spoke with Pattison. If you look up 'mitochondria' in a biology textbook, you'll find a definition that is some variation of 'powerhouses of the cell.' But accumulating research shows these organelles are also social beings that orchestrate the inner workings of the cell; they even communicate with and help one another. Of course, when mitochondria malfunction, diseases can ensue. Behavioral neuroscientist Martin Picard's passionate profile of mitochondria in this issue gave me a lesson in not only the value of basic science but also the wonders of life.
