Acclaimed Oregon chef Jacob Harth makes his debut at a sustainable seafood restaurant in the Bay Area with Winnie's

A celebrated chef, specializing for sustainable seafood will open his new restaurant on California’s Bay Area coast—and Labor Day weekend is your chance to get a sneak peek. Winnie’s is chef Jacob Harth’s next restaurant, set to open in early summer 2025, and he’s showcasing a series of dishes at Maison Healdsburg on Sunday, Sept. 1, and Monday, Sept. 2. Harth is working with David Sisler, a co-founder of restaurant consulting firm Suited Hospitality and a former Michelin-starred restaurant owner at places like SingleThread and Saison. “My biggest interest is what can be discovered and tapped into in California’s seafood industry,” Harth says. “The different water temperatures in California provide a lot more diversity (in seafood options). I think there’s a lot more potential in California, and the goal is to just keep pushing that forward.”

Harth gained attention with his 20-course sustainable seafood tasting menu at Portland’s Erizo—often harvesting the seafood himself. His radical process earned him one of the 16 spots on Eater’s Best New Restaurants in America for 2019, and Harth was named a 2019 Eater Young Gun. After the pandemic hit in 2020, Erizo shifted to serving private dinners on an Oregon beach, eventually becoming a pop-up residency at Nevør Shellfish Farm in Tillamook, Oregon, where he served an a la carte menu for a year. Eventually, Erizo closed. After that, Harth says, he challenged himself to work at more upscale restaurants, eventually landing at the Michelin-starred (and now-closed) Oxalis in Brooklyn before moving on as executive chef at the Michelin-starred Place des Fêtes. After a year, Harth and his partner moved to the Bay Area to be closer to their families as they were expecting their first child, Winnie. At the same time, Harth took on another project: opening the Michelin-starred restaurant Sarde in Mexico City.

That all says that Winnie’s will be the pinnacle of that experience, everything packed into this new California restaurant, no holds barred. Harth says he’s 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, but to have an impact on the community through our environmental ethos, which is making sensible choices, using underused and overlooked products and also just supporting the producers of these things.”

Food from the upcoming restaurant Winnie's, by Chef Jacob Harth. — Marinated barnacles

That means Harth will be pushing hard to highlight under-used seafood and fishermen’s bycatch – fish that is usually caught with the main product but perhaps thrown back into the water due to lack of popularity. Harth cited hake as an example: “It’s caught in mass quantities here and used as bait or they make imitation crab out of it – they treat it really badly,” says Harth. “But in France, Spain and Italy, or all the Mediterranean countries, they treat it really well – it’s one of the most expensive fish on the market.” Harth believes it’s a less popular option due to a lack of willingness to try it, but he hopes to change that.

At the Winnie’s pop-up in Maison Healdsburg, diners can see that philosophy in action. The menu features a mix of grilled and raw bar fare, and while the menu may change based on fishermen’s availability, it will potentially feature dishes like purple sea urchin rolls, giant clams with tigernut fish, abalone skewers, and oysters with Green Mountain peppers. When you look closely at these ingredients, you’ll understand why certain seafood is highlighted. Purple sea urchins, for example, are considered an invasive species because they wreak havoc on California’s kelp forests; only now are they finally being marketed for restaurant use, Harth says. Plus, he’s especially excited about the line-caught sardines with calamansi, brought in by a fisherman who normally specializes in yellowtail and mackerel. “Sardines are an important food source for everyone in the world, but I still think they’re overlooked,” he says. “Most of the time I feel like they are treated wrongly. They are boiled to death or canned, but we serve them raw because we get incredible quality.”

Winnie’s is the restaurant project Harth has been waiting to open all these years, and the Bay Area will finally be its home base. “It’s been a long time coming,” Harth says. “We’ve traveled, learned, gotten better, and kept that in mind as we’ve worked on other projects over the last four years. We’re ready to open our own place.”

Winnie’s will open in early summer 2025. The restaurant will be House Healdsburg (210 Healdsburg Avenue, Healdsburg) on Sunday, September 1, and Monday, September 2, from 5:00 p.m. until late.