Hotel 1000 Replaces Boka With All Water Seafood and Oyster Bar

Downtown’s luxury Hotel 1000 shuttered its Boka Restaurant and Bar after 11 years and is replacing it with a new fish-focused restaurant called All Water Seafood and Oyster Bar, set to open on September 28 with dishes like clam meatballs and crab cakes.

The new restaurant borrows its name from a route that led gold prospectors from Seattle across the northern Pacific and to the Alaskan coast. As the name also suggests, the menu will focus heavily on seafood, with the kitchen purchasing small quantities of fish daily and promising to serve them less than 24 hours after they’ve left the boat. Oysters from local farms, plus regional produce and local beer on draft, will round things out. Executive chef Scott Mickelson, who headed Boka, will remain at the helm after the transition.

The fight to stay relevant in booming Seattle — especially as a hotel restaurant, despite something of a built-in audience — is a real one, as the team behind the revamped Outlier, which replaced Sazerac inside Hotel Monaco earlier this year, can attest.

And yet with a press release’s vague promises of “seasonal flavors” and “elegant and creative dishes done simply, and right,” it doesn’t seem as if All Water has figured out yet how to distinguish itself in an increasingly crowded field. Hotel restaurants are rarely the most hotly anticipated or innovative openings, and with competition from newcomers like Rider, set to open inside the new Hotel Theodore in November, All Water has its work cut out.