Dining: A Clam and a Swan Walk into a Restaurant

The least confusing way to describe the differences between lakeside newcomers The 100 Pound Clam and The White Swan Public House is that the former serves lunch and the latter serves dinner.

But its more than that. On warm days, The 100 Pound Clam acts as a walk-up lunch spot with a 65-seat patio; when the weather turns too cold for even the restaurant-issued patio blankets to warm diners, they can choose to eat indoors (at The White Swan) while still ordering from the seafood-shack menu.

Beginning at happy hour, theres a more sophisticated dinner menu, courtesy of White Swan chef Josh Nebe, plus more oysters and cocktails.

Got it? Yeah, we hear you.

But forget your confusion for a moment and focus on the important stuff: These two restaurants, both owned by Dan Bugge, who also owns Matts in the Market and Radiator Whiskey, offer unconventional seafood with the kind of water views that make Seattleites salivate. In the end, thats all that matters.

At lunch, youll find the Clam staff frying up salty, cornmeal-crusted rockfish with fries dusted in dill ($14). Theyre ladling big bowls of what may be the citys best seafood chowder thick, not from a cornstarch slurry, but from the sheer quantity of a rotating assortment of fin fish, together with potatoes and bacon ($9). The dinner menu, Bugge explains, was designed to offer the Matts style with a little bit of the Radiator flair. It makes sense, then, that he hired chef Nebe to lead the kitchen. Nebe has spent the past couple of years at Radiator Whiskey; before that, he was crafting corn dogs at Unicorn bar on Capitol Hill.

The melding of Bugges daring dish ideas and Nebes why not? approach results in a boldly flavorful menu thats a little tongue in cheek. Smoked oysters and bacon are matched with bone marrow in an over-the-top, umami-packed take on an old-school English dish called bone marrow Kilpatrik ($16). Hawaiian blue prawns ($23) swim in something Bugge describes as clarified brain butter, made from the prawns shells (along with all those tasty bits inside the heads) and lemons roasted in the wood-fired oven. One of the best dishes isnt seafood at all: a house-made bratwurst served in a pool of cashew curry sauce ($19), which Nebes fans may recognize as a version of a dish he offered when he ran a German pop-up called Dackel in 2014. Nebe and Bugge hope to add some celebratory whole-table seafood spreads, which will require you to roll up your sleeves and get at those little fish bones with your hands.

The inspiration for both restaurants came from the 10-plus years Bugge spent slinging fish at Pike Place Market. When visitors would ask where they could get clams or salmon or the days catch, he came up dry on what to recommend. Mind you, this was before RockCreek, the seafood place I currently recommend, and before Westward, the seafood restaurant with one of the best views. Still, what Bugge and Nebe have accomplished is unlike either of those: a pair of waterfront restaurants casual enough for after-work cocktails and oysters or a quick weekday lunch, yet celebratory enough for date-night dinners.

The 100 Pound Clam & The White Swan Public House
South Lake Union, 1001 Fairview Ave. N
100poundclam.com, 206.453.5067
whiteswanpublichouse.com, 206.588.2680