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.

5 editor picks for Dungeness crab in Seattle, ranked by editorial score. All Seattle signature dishes · Dungeness crab across every city.