A Celebrated Oregon Chef Is Making His Sustainable Seafood Restaurant Debut in the Bay Area (2024)

An acclaimed chef specializing in sustainable seafood is set to open his new coastal California restaurant in the Bay Area — and Labor Day weekend is your chance to catch a sneak peek. Winnie’s is chef Jacob Harth’s upcoming restaurant, slated to open in early summer 2025, and he’s showcasing a series of dishes at Maison Healdsburg on Sunday, September 1, and Monday, September 2. Harth is partnering with David Sisler, a co-founder of restaurant consulting firm Suited Hospitality and an alum of Michelin-starred restaurants such as SingleThread and Saison. “My biggest interest lies in what can be discovered and unlocked in the seafood industry in California,” Harth says. “California’s different water temperatures create a lot more diversity [in seafood options]. I think there’s much more potential in California, and the goal is just to continue to push that.”

Harth gained attention for his 20-course sustainable seafood tasting menu at Portland’s Erizo — often harvesting the seafood himself. His radical process earned one of 16 spots on Eater’s Best New Restaurants in America for 2019 with Harth named as a 2019 Eater Young Gun. After the onset of the pandemic in 2020, Erizo pivoted to serving private dinners on an Oregon beach and eventually, it turned into a pop-up residency at Nevør Shellfish Farm in Tillamook, Oregon, for a year serving an a la carte menu. Ultimately Erizo closed. Afterward, Harth says he challenged himself to work at higher-level restaurants, eventually landing at one-Michelin-starred (and now-closed) Oxalis in Brooklyn before moving on as chef at Michelin-listed Place des Fêtes. After a year, Harth and his partner moved to the Bay Area to be closer to their families as they expected their first child, Winnie. Simultaneously, Harth took on another project: opening Michelin-listed Sarde in Mexico City.

This is all to say that Winnie’s is set to be the culmination of that experience, all packed into this upcoming California restaurant, with no holds barred. Harth says he only scratched the surface of his larger vision with Erizo. “My biggest regret with [Erizo] was that it was so inaccessible — three days a week, 20 seats,” Harth says. “One of my goals is not just to have a restaurant and not just to make money, it’s to make an impact in the community through the environmental ethos that we have, which is to make sound decisions, use underutilized products and overlooked products, and also just to support the harvesters of those things.”

Jacob Harth

What that means is Harth will lean hard into highlighting less-used seafood and fisherman bycatch — fish that is typically caught alongside the main product but is perhaps thrown back into the water due to lack of popularity. Harth pointed to hake as an example: “It’s caught in droves here and they use it as bait, or they make imitation crab out of it — they treat it really crappy,” Harth says. “But in France and Spain and Italy, or any Mediterranean countries, they take really good care of them — it’s one of the most expensive fishes at the market.” Harth feels it’s a less popular option due to a lack of willingness to try it, but he’s hoping to change that.

At the Winnie’s pop-up at Maison Healdsburg, diners will see this philosophy at play. The menu will feature a mix of grilled and raw bar items, and while the menu may change due to availability from fishermen, there will potentially be dishes such as purple sea urchin buns; geoduck with husk cherries; gooseneck barnacles; abalone skewers; and oysters with Green Mountain peppers. Dive deeper into those ingredients and you’ll see why certain seafood is highlighted. Purple sea urchins, for instance, are considered an invasive species as they are wreaking havoc on California’s kelp forests; only now are they finally coming to market for restaurant use, Harth says. He’s also particularly excited about line-caught sardines with calamansi, brought in by a fisherman who typically specializes in yellowtail and mackerel. “Sardines are a huge food source for everything in the world, but I really still think that they’re overlooked,” he says. “Most of the time, I feel like they get mishandled. They’re boiled to death or canned, but we serve them raw because we get amazing quality.”

Winnie’s is the restaurant project that Harth has been waiting to open all these years, and the Bay Area will finally be the home base for it. “It’s been a long time coming,” Harth says. “We’ve been traveling, learning, getting better, and keeping this in mind as we worked on other projects for the last four years. We’re ready to open our very own place.”

Winnie’s will open in early summer 2025. The restaurant will pop up at Maison Healdsburg (210 Healdsburg Avenue, Healdsburg) on Sunday, September 1, and Monday, September 2, from 5 p.m. until late.

Jacob Harth

Jacob Harth

Jacob Harth

Jacob Harth