Early spring is an ideal time to visit Tomales Bay in West Marin

A friendly debate about grilled oysters had broken out among customers waiting in line to order at the Marshall Store, one of the handful of picturesque seafood restaurants along the shoreline of Tomales Bay in West Marin.

A visit to quiet, beautiful Tomales Bay in early spring

“I like the oysters with barbecue sauce,” someone said. There were majority nods, but also a couple pro arguments for the Rockefeller-style, crowned with mulchy spinach and two cheeses and breadcrumbs. One voice down the row spoke up for ones covered in garlic butter and bacon before the queue shuffled forward and I moved inside the building.

Out the doors, beyond the restaurant’s slim deck, the sky and the bay merged into the same color of gray-blue, separated through the center of the sightline by brown-green hills in the distance. I felt like I was looking at one of Rothko’s more somber palates for a moment, and then a sailboat bobbed into view across the choppy waters.

It had been half my lifetime since I’d visited Tomales Bay, a scenic detour during a trip to San Francisco when I was a young, keen restaurant cook and food geek but hadn’t yet jumped into professional writing. Fast-forward 25 years: A friend from out of state wanted to meet up somewhere beautiful in California. I’d remembered my summertime visit long ago and wondered what the place — which is no secret, the area receives millions of visitors annually — might be like during the calmer, cooler cusp of spring.

Now from my place in line I could see into a smaller room to the right of the Marshall Store’s main space. Counters ran the length of the picture windows, but this area also functioned as part of the kitchen. A cook stood at an open-flame grill covered in shucked oysters, their tapering oval forms looking prehistoric with jagged ridges. He spurted water over the oysters and steam billowed around them. Above the range was a shelf where hunks of garlic bread lay warming in the heat. Watching him I felt very eager for lunch.

The staff tends to pick out slightly smaller oysters to serve raw; they aren’t radically saline but still pleasantly briny, with a mildness to their texture and flavor that comes across buttery.

A version of the grilled oysters sprinkled with chorizo proved overpowering, and the barbecue sauce leaned too sweet for me. The garlic-butter-bacon enveloped in the way those ingredients will, rich and smoky, without obliterating the bivalves’ subtler qualities. The Rockefeller variation most won me over, with the soft, blitzed spinach scented with garlic butter and the satisfying contrast of frizzled cheese over top.

I was full of oysters by then but appreciated a few of them smoked as well, each languidly draped over toast with precise dots of chipotle aioli and minced chives. Dungeness crab season runs through July in Northern California, so a sandwich on a crusty roll crunching against lacy crabmeat made good sense, as did a smoked trout and little gem salad for, you know, some lettuce.

We ate slowly, the waterside smells and sounds and beauty calming us into a slower rhythm. It was the first, and best, meal of the trip.

Plenty of locals would disagree with me, pointing you first to Hog Island Oyster Co. Nearly 20 years ago, when I briefly worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, the Hog Island oyster bar at the Ferry Building Marketplace was a few years old and a favorite lunchtime refuge. They made a thick grilled cheese with three cheeses that was different — creamy, textured, funky — with each bite. I returned recently while reporting on a fresh guide to dining in San Francisco, and my grilled cheese was greasy and thin and not the same, and neither was the overall energy of the restaurant.

The view from a hill on the property of the Lodge at Marconi hotel in Marshall, Calif.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

In Tomales Bay, at the source, I remembered again why I’d loved Hog Island. Certainly have a meal at one of its local enterprises. The Boat Oyster Bar is an outdoor daytime cafe at the company’s oyster bar, and unlike the Marshall Store reservations are possible, and necessary. I most enjoyed an early dinner at Tony’s Seafood Restaurant, originally built on the shoreline in 1948 and bought by Hog Island founders John Finger and Terry Sawyer in 2017, which they closed soon after for a renovation debuted in 2019.

Its menu usually has a couple of oyster varieties from Hog Island and a handful of other rotating purveyors, mostly from Washington state. Among the grilled options, the smoky echoes of a chipotle-bourbon butter nicely complemented the oysters. A seafood stew in tomato-garlic broth warmed us at the evening temperatures dipped into the 40s.

I gave a chance to this version of the grilled cheese — a stretchy, molten mix of Nicasio Valley Foggy Morning (a mild fromage blanc), Vella Dry Jack and Gruyère on toasted green onion focaccia from Berkeley-based Acme Bread Co. — and, even if it lacks the funky edge I loved to the way-back masterpiece, this one surpassed my recent San Francisco experience.

Strawberry hand pie at Route One Bakery & Kitchen in Tomales, Calif.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

My poor friend. If she’d hoped for a weekend of hiking trails or beach walks, the things visitors often do to absorb nature around Tomales Bay and adjacent Point Reyes Peninsula, she should have known better.

We did walk the spring-green grounds of quiet Lodge at Marconi, a hotel property with a colorful history, named for radio inventor and his transoceanic Marshall Receiving Station that later housed Synanon, a drug rehabilitation program that veered into a 1970s-era cult. The present peacefulness makes that all feel far in the past.

Mostly, we drove up and down the Marin stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway, hopping from meal to meal.

A late breakfast of pastries from Route One Bakery and Kitchen, where a flaky-crisp strawberry hand pie particularly stood out, turned into lunch when the operation begins baking pizzas with puffy sourdough crusts.

One night we headed to Inverness, on the bay’s opposite shore, for dinner at Saltwater Oyster Depot. Despite its name (and the ubiquitous availability of raw and grilled oysters), Luc Chamberland’s restaurant is more in the bistro lineage, with two softly lit rooms, an inviting bar and a short, ever-in-flux menu. At the edge of spring that meant warming dishes like meatballs over polenta huddled against sides of sauteed chard and roasted carrots. Saltwater, at least at this time of year, was a local’s club; we ran into the Lodge at Marconi’s gracious general manager and her husband there.

The view over Tomales Bay at sunset across the street from Saltwater Oyster Depot in Inverness, Calif.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

An ambling afternoon in Point Reyes Station, the area’s business locus, was the weekend’s most meaningful stop. I had forgotten that Point Reyes Books is absolutely perfect: small but not too cramped, fantastic shelf-talkers and staff recommendations, the kind of place you find books you’ve not heard of before that practically call out to you to pick up.

Around the corner is West Marin Culture Shop, a two-year-old food hall with a winking name referencing its focus on fermented foods. For 25 years the barnlike space housed Cowgirl Creamery, the cheese company founded by Peggy Smith and Sue Conley, who sold their company and retired in 2021. That’s why my mid-20s self had rented a car in 1999 to drive from San Francisco to West Marin: I was a goofy cheese head (still am) and wanted to show up at the place where these women were advancing American cheese-making with their triple-cream Mt. Tam and their pungent, meaty washed-rind Red Hawk.

The grilled cheese I had once loved at Hog Island? Originally it was made using bolder Cowgirl Creamery cheeses.

These days the food hall contains a lovely cheese counter with local and international options, and a fun stand run sells ice cream floats made with buffalo milk soft serve from Double 8 Dairy in Petaluma and seasonal fruit sodas with a kombucha intensity. We had a citrusy-floral kumquat ice cream float alongside a hot pastrami from the adjoining sandwich stand that was easily large enough for two. Maggie Levinger and Luke Regalbuto, whose Wild West Ferments supply the sauerkraut for the pastrami, also spearheaded the building’s transformation.

A hot pastrami sandwich from West Marin Culture Shop in Point Reyes Station, Calif.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

It’s a great stop for food hounds, even if the moment for me didn’t quite meet the heightened memories from my younger days. What I appreciated more in this return was that businesses may open or close or transform, but the splendor of Tomales Bay remains intact.

Also …