Anacortes has been attracting some great new restaurants recently. The latest addition, Tide & Taste, has just opened in the space between the Brown Lantern and Frida’s Gourmet Mexican Cuisine in downtown, previously occupied by The Nest.
Tide & Taste is owned and run by Nick LaLonde (one of the owners of Good Bagels, also in Anacortes) and his wife Kami, with the intention of becoming a fine dining/date night destination utilizing Pacific Northwest products of all kinds.
Tide & Taste opened a month ago and has taken off running, with constant changes to the menu and an active social media presence. (Author’s note: Some of the dishes in this review may no longer be available, as it is a fluid menu.) The space is still a bit sterile, like an apartment you’ve just moved into when all your books and posters are still in storage. The kitchen takes up most of the room, with tables filling a narrow swathe running to the back wall. It seems like a kitchen counter would be a great feature here, but diners do have a partial view into the work area, which is always entertaining.
I visited for the first time about two weeks after their soft opening, and service was friendly and well-organized. They had just gotten their liquor license and had a list of mostly Washington wines, with lots of options by the glass, and a short list of classic cocktails. We got the white negroni and an old fashioned, both well-executed (both $14).
We started with bread with honey butter ($5). The bread was a flat focaccia-style loaf cut into slices; a little dry, but pleasant. It was accompanied by what looked exactly like a scoop of vanilla ice cream — but that was the butter, which ended up tasting like very heavy whipped cream with orange zest, not a bad thing at all but a little sweet.
Sunchoke soup ($11) was on the menu during my visit, and it was a winner. A thick earthy puree tasting of mushrooms and artichokes was topped with tiny oyster mushrooms, nasturtium leaves and little crispy sunchoke chips that were so delicate, they almost melted away. A heavy drizzle of sesame oil over the top gave it an extra umami punch, very nice.
We also enjoyed the beef skewers ($21), which were served in a dish full of fragrant nuoc cham sauce and topped with peanuts, mint and parsley. The beef was seared with nicely blackened crispy bits but not overcooked, and tender enough that I could pick up a skewer and take a bite without the whole piece of beef coming off the stick.
I always have to try crab pasta if it’s on the menu. When we went, Tide & Taste presented a crab tagliatelle ($45), made with extra-wide homemade pasta, just rough enough so the creme fraiche sauce clung perfectly to it, with a very decent amount of crab hiding in the pasta folds. The crispy, finely shredded leek on the plate was a nice presentation and suited the crab and sauce perfectly.
Ricotta gnocchi is one of those things that can vary a lot from place to place. These were perfect, light and just a little chewy, served in a dense puree of squash studded with more pieces of squash and topped with crispy pepitas ($31). Along with the soup, this was my favorite dish so far.
Desserts included a chocolate tart and an olive oil cake. We went for the tart ($9), which was a slab of rich, sweet, fudgy chocolate topped with coarse salt, served with a scoop of very mild caramel gelato. The crumble it was served on wasn’t crunchy enough to provide a textural contrast, so we shoved it off to one side, but otherwise enjoyed the dessert.
A week after our first visit, it opened for lunch and happy hour, so we went for an early dinner. The biggest draw of happy hour is $1 oysters, a screaming deal by any standards (and offered all day on Mondays). On this particular visit, they were Capital oysters from Vashon Island — larger than I usually prefer my oysters, but fresh, briny and sweet, served simply with crushed ice and mignonette.
Tide & Taste had just introduced several house cocktails, all of which sounded good. We tried the Alpine & Lime (gin, lime, Chartreuse, mint) and the Rye & Resin (rye, mezcal, vermouth, Campari), $10 each during happy hour. Both tasted exactly like we expected them to from the menu descriptions and were well-made.
As of this writing, Tide & Taste just announced that it’s already changing the entire lunch and happy hour menus, but here’s what we got: I decided to order the burger, although I was a little wary. A couple of summers ago, Good Bagels was doing a summer burger night once a week and I was excited to go, but the burger and fries that we got were disappointing enough that I never went back.
I was happy to find the Tide & Taste burger ($15) to be a vast improvement, with a decent bun, two thin-but-still-slightly-pink patties, and thin-but-crispy and salty fries. I wouldn’t go out of my way for this burger, but I’d never object to it appearing in front of me.
We also tried the fried chicken sandwich ($15), which came with an entire fat chicken thigh, very tender and crispy, sticking out of its bun and topped with slaw. We paired it with the side house salad, which was somewhere between Greek and chopped style, with peperoncini and bits of salty cheese. We also got the kale Caesar salad ($14), which I thought could have used a bit more dressing or some other extra zip, but that didn’t stop us from eating all of it.
Tide & Taste is obviously still developing and settling into itself, but the menu has serious promise and they’re going to be a great addition to what was already an excellent restaurant neighborhood of downtown Anacortes. And if I want oysters and a cocktail any day of the week, I know where to go.
Tide & Taste is open 2–9 p.m. daily at 414 Commercial St., Anacortes. Info: tideandtaste.com.
Jessamyn Tuttle is a freelance writer and photographer based in the Skagit Valley.
