Dungeness Crab appears as a signature dish in 2 United States cities. See each city's local variant and where to eat it.

Dungeness crab · San Francisco

Dungeness crab is the sweet, brown-meat Pacific crab the city eats from mid-November to June, served steamed and cracked at Swan Oyster Depot, Tadich Grill and the Wharf.

The Dungeness fishery, named for a tiny harbour on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, opened commercially in San Francisco in the 1850s. Crab Louis salad emerged at Solari's Grill near Union Square in the early 1900s. The modern season is set by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and usually opens the second week of November, with delays for low meat or marine biotoxins (most recently 2015 and 2020). Swan Oyster Depot on Polk Street, opened 1912, is the cracked-crab benchmark; Sotto Mare runs cioppino with it through winter.

Where to eat in San Francisco:

Dungeness crab · Seattle

Seattle's defining shellfish: sweet, dense, snow-white meat from the cold Pacific. Eaten cracked at the table with drawn butter, or chilled in a cocktail at Pike Place.

Dungeness crab takes its name from the spit of land north of Sequim where Native peoples and later white settlers harvested it from the 1840s on. The Washington commercial fishery formalised in the 1890s and supplied Seattle's restaurants from the rebuilt Pike Place Market after the 1907 fire. Crab season runs winter through summer in the open ocean and December through March in Puget Sound, sex-restricted to males above a 6 1/4 inch carapace. The dish is canonical at Pike Place Chowder, where it goes into the chowder pot and on top, and at Westward, where it arrives cracked over a board of crushed ice. Crabbing is also a private rite: tribal allocations and state-licensed recreational pots run from Hood Canal up to the Skagit Bay.

Where to eat in Seattle:

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