On a Thursday afternoon I was able to walk right up to the counter at GoodMart on Ballard Avenue and order lunch, which surprised me. 

GoodMart is owned by Victor Steinbrueck, who opened Local Tide in Fremont during the height of the pandemic (August 2020) and built it into one of Seattle’s most acclaimed seafood restaurants. Steinbrueck’s second spot should have been greeted by celebrations or at least a line. 

I’m going to guess there will be a line soon. GoodMart’s specialty is lunch trays, which means your choice of protein with a salad, rice, and often something pickly. Aside from a Japanese-style pork-and-beef “hambagu” patty and a mushroom option, the proteins are all seafood, though they’re prepared all sorts of different ways—the rockfish is steamed, the salmon pan-seared until its skin gets crispy. I picked ling cod, freshly battered in a panko-esque coating and fried until the outside is light and crunchy, served alongside a little dish of sweet tonkatsu sauce and another little dish of takuan, Japanese pickled radish.  

The lunch trays offer a range of proteins, including steamed rockfish, crispy-skinned salmon, and a Japanese-style pork-and-beef patty, among other options.

Photo by Nathan To / GoodMart

There are some differences between Steinbrueck’s two restaurants. Local Tide’s menu borrows influences from all over—the rockfish banh mi is a standout, and on the weekends it serves a popular New England–style crab roll. GoodMart feels like it has a bit more of a point of view, with Japanese, or Japanese-American, touches throughout. The rice is generously seasoned with furikake, and the little gem salad comes dosed in a creamy, umami-laced black sesame dressing. And where Local Tide has some menu items that invite sharing (crab toast for the table, anyone?), the lunch tray format at GoodMart means that everyone is getting their own thing. If you’re with a group, though, there are a few starters to split; when I was there this included the smoked salmon belly dip (a Local Tide staple) and larb, the Laotian dish typically made with minced meat, here prepared with fish. 

The space has plenty of light thanks to the storefront’s big windows, which was one of the draws for Steinbrueck. Originally, he says, he wanted to find a production facility for Local Tide. “I’d been looking for places where there’s enough space for us to do the work that we need, but always with the thought of wanting to find a space that’s bright, as I don’t like bringing my team into a windowless prep kitchen,” he says. But after they brought in their equipment and fish, Steinbrueck and his team realized the space could be more than just a prep space. “I guess it’s going to be a restaurant too,” is how he put it.

GoodMart is still in its soft-opening phase. It’s likely to evolve with time. There’s a big wooden wraparound bar that would be a great place to serve oysters, Steinbrueck says. There are some shelves where guests can buy sauces and other staples, but Steinbrueck envisions using leftovers and scraps from the cooking process to make retail products—fish sausages, maybe, or stocks or smoked fish collars that people could take home to grill. 

Just like at Local Tide, there’s a focus on local ingredients at GoodMart. The shelves include chocolates from local maker Spinnaker and soda syrups from Indigenous-owned brand Natoncks Metsu.

“I’m born and raised here in Seattle,” says Steinbrueck. “We really feel like we want to do right by Seattle. That’s why we choose to use local fish. It would be a lot easier to go out and grab any type of fish to be able to use, but we want to try and make a place that is true to where we live—not just in the food that we serve, but in the spaces that we create and hospitality that we offer.”