Restaurant Review: Anchovies & Olives

Is Capitol Hill's Anchovies & Olives the great Seattle seafood haunt we've all been waiting for, or is it more of the same from Ethan Stowell?

It's a question few of us can answer with complete confidence: What is Seattle’s best seafood restaurant? For years the answer has required a tiresome back-and-forth: Love oysters? Then Elliott’s is it. Going for lunch? Matt’s in the Market is unbeatable. Craving fish and chips? Spud at the Ballard Locks is a great bet (or Pike Street Fish Fry, if whoever’s asking meets the tattoo quotient). But a great, all-around seafood restaurant—in a town filled to the gills with salmon, halibut, oysters and Dungeness crab—has remained frustratingly elusive.

Local restaurateur and chef Ethan Stowell may have had that conundrum in mind when he decided to focus solely on seafood at his fourth restaurant in just six years, Anchovies & Olives, which he opened in February in a corner space beneath the Pearl Apartments on Capitol Hill. Stowell first made headlines in 2003 when he opened Union, where he wowed us with unusual seafoods and meats served in offbeat yet uncanny combinations. Nowadays, he’s a household name for frequent in-town diners who’ve tasted his bright-clean style—fraught with lemon, good olive oil and Italian parsley, and often piqued with chilies—at Tavolàta, Union and How to Cook a Wolf.

Here again at Anchovies, Stowell’s style is front and center, as easy to recognize as a tourist on a rainy day (umbrella!). Impeccably fresh seafood is the focus in the sparely decorated 42-seat space, and Stowell’s Italian-leaning, less-is-more approach does wonders for it. Assorted crudo—essentially an Italian riff on sashimi (raw fish)—show off just how carefully Stowell sources his seafood: Perfect hamachi ($14) requires little embellishment, and so the blood orange–fennel pollen accompaniments are simply there to uplift the sweet fish. Sea scallops—as sweet and buttery as any I’ve ever tasted—are plain perfect, whether left raw, sliced thin and barely dressed ($12), or grilled rare and perched atop tender controne beans ($18).

But as I delved deeper into the menu, sampling nearly every seafood dish in the hopes of finding the holy grail—Seattle’s definitive seafood spot—I was overcome by a wave of déjà vu instead. In addition to the obvious similarities—Columbia City focaccia ($2), marinated olives ($5) and other snacks offered at each of Stowell’s restaurants—I recognized the anchovy-garlic-chile spaghetti ($14) on the menu, and I know I’d seen a play on the brilliant octopus salad ($14) before. Dish after dish rang familiar.

So one evening I decided to do an experiment. First, I dined at Tavolàta, tasting again the sensationally tender octopus salad dressed in a lovely lemon-olive oil dressing popping with chile flakes and chopped chives. Then, on my way to dinner at Anchovies, I stopped at Union to pick up a menu. Turns out, my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me: The cauliflower agnolotti I’d adored at How to Cook a Wolf a year earlier was