Cove to Table: Simple Seafood Recipes from Tomales Bay’s Nick’s Cove
One half of the couple behind the restaurant highlights Northern California coastal cooking in her cookbook, ‘Table With a View.’
Frankie Frankeny
Achingly beautiful Tomales Bay sits at the nexus of so much that embodies the Northern California culinary dream—abundant seafood, artisanal cheese, organic farms on picturesque rolling hills with views of the sea—and Nick’s Cove and Cottages is where it all coalesces on a perfectly ramshackle jetty jutting out into the sea.
Ever since a Croatian immigrant named Nick Kojich opened a little seafood restaurant in an old herring-curing facility and started renting out waterfront cottages by the night, road trippers on Highway 1 have had a place to eat shrimp cocktail, gaze out at the water, and enjoy a view that’s barely changed for 90-some years. But what has changed is the quality of the food, an evolution jumpstarted in the late 1990s when Bay Area restaurateurs Pat Kuleto and Mark Franz bought Nick’s, restored it, and elevated the offerings. Not only does Nick’s now have its own farm that produces many of the vegetables on the menu, within 100 miles you’ve also got some of the best purveyors in the United States, many of which round out the building blocks of the dishes at the restaurant: Hog Island Oysters, Liberty Ducks, Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese, Cowgirl Creamery, County Line Harvest, and the list goes on.
