By Meg Van Huygen

It's the first truly warm, don't-need-a-hoodie day of the year, and Brian Hibbard’s out on the sidewalk with a couple of his staff members, all taking pics of each other at the patio bar top. Behind them, inside the restaurant, thousands of wine and amaro bottles glitter under a stray sunbeam. “We're just out here clowning and taking selfies,” Hibbard calls to me as I walk up. “Can't waste that good sunlight!”

Springtime is on parade on Field Bar, a farm-to-table bar-resto and wine shop at Sixth and Oakes, and it’s no accident. Or… wait, it kind of is.

Hibbard opened the restaurant in mid-2020, in the midst of the pandemic lockdown, and that historic era has massively shaped the restaurant’s identity—as their plans to be a neighborhood bar had polymorphed into something else by the time the doors were open. “I was originally imagining a cocktail bar with, y'know, little snacks,” Hibbard says, “and then all of a sudden, we couldn't sell cocktails, but we could sell takeout food, and we could sell bottles of wine.” He gestures to the probably two thousand bottles of wine on a colossal shelf, which comprise the bottle shop portion of the space. So that was their first incarnation.

The menu has shapeshifted as well, far beyond little snacks. Twenty feet away, Chef Ike Hippensteel is at work in what's perhaps Tacoma's smallest kitchen—more of an alcove or a nook—while a scent cloud of grilled lamb spreads over our heads and throughout the space.

Ah, that's right. I was so dazzled by all the beautiful springtime veg on the menu, I forgot It's also lamb season. I've already ordered a hummus plate with seasonal crudité and a whole mountain of massaged kale salad with grapefruit suprèmes, pickled fennel, cured egg, lemon vinaigrette, a pile of shaved pecorino, and the most impeccable croutons—made from Balloon Roof Baking Company sourdough, out of Fife—and I don't have time or room for an entree. But I text my partner to let him know how incredible this lamb chop smells, and we put a date on the calendar to come back.

“Let's make it soon,” I type, “because who knows how long they'll have it on the menu.” That's farm-to-table life, don’t chew know.

Hippensteel backs me up. “Yeah, the thing about spring and summer is that the seasons for each item are so much shorter, which affects our menu. If you want to use, for example, blueberries in something, your window of opportunity is a couple weeks. You’ve gotta be ready for it when it comes, and then you have to be ready to transition to, say, peaches next.”

Hippensteel worked in Seattle kitchens for a decade—an alum of The Shambles, Revel, Joule,  and Brimmer & Heeltap, among others—then went to Norway to help friends open a restaurant, before joining his old colleague, Hibbard, in 2021. “We weren’t originally planning on being as, well, fancy as we are now!” he admits. “But there’s so much beautiful produce, and also a demographic for fine-er dining in Tacoma, that we felt like we wanted to capture. So we just started making things, you know, cleaner and prettier.”

I'm a craft cocktail dude, and before I knew anything about Field Bar’s food, it was the gorgeous and creative bar program that initially lured me in. My current favorite is Always Money in the Banana Stand, with bourbon, calvados, lemon, spiced banana syrup, date syrup, black walnut bitters, and spiced banana salt, and I like to add a glass of extra-spicy pressed ginger juice to nurse between sips. This place is a paradise for wine dorks too, though, which I'm working on becoming. Chilling at Field Bar is a great way to learn.

“Natural wine is super important to me, and I’m passionate in general about natural wine production,” Brian explains. “Although I don’t love the term ‘natural wine,’ but it’s the best way to describe wine that… isn’t the kind that’s being produced on a huge scale in the American wine industry. We’re removing these huge categories in Washington and Napa from our collection: wine that’s super chemical-induced, super bad for your body, super cancer-causing. Stabilized wine. Or they’ll, like, make the wine more purple artificially, or more acidified or all this crap. So we, uh, sell wines by wineries that don’t do that.”

He’s also passionate about amari, which is obvious when you walk in the door and behold number of bottles looming over the bar. Not that I’m the queen of amaro or anything, but they have tons of stuff I’ve never seen. “We have SO much stuff,” Brian laughs. “I love that the reps know I love amaro and will come here to show us new things. We’ve actually gotten certain bottles to begin being imported here, into Washington State, through Field Bar. One thing I like about amari is that the range of alcohol content is really broad. You can have a low-ABV amaro, you can have a wine-based one, you can have super high-proof ones. An amaro can be a digestif, it can be an aperitif, it can be a sipper. You can pair it with other things. You can just choose your own adventure with a collection like this.”

Hibbard and Hippensteel both come to us from Seattle, although Hippensteel has roots in Wisconsin, while Brian’s here by way of Orcas Island, where he worked at Doe Bay Resort, among other spots. “A lot of the concept behind Field Bar is agricultural, thanks to this time in my life,” Brian says. “In Orcas, everybody sourced all the food really locally, because it just makes more sense on an island. Like, our fisherperson would come over on a boat from Lopez Island and say, ‘Oh, here’s what I caught on the way over—do you want it?’ And I’d create a dish out of it, and that became so normalized for me. So at first, Field was just gonna be natural wine and cocktails and snacks and a break from that world of really intense food? But COVID happened while we were fixing up the space and there were all these permit issues, and I had been living in Tacoma for a while when I was starting to open the bar, and it was clear that we just needed a place that has this type of locally sourced food. Ike is from a rural background as well, and both of us bonded while working together in Seattle restaurants thanks to this shared agricultural experience. We had to do it.”

But they’d already done the build-out on the space by the time Hibbard and Hippensteel made this realization, which is why the kitchen is the size of a shoebox. “Well, we have a prep room with sinks and a dishwasher in the back and a walk-in refrigerated trailer in the yard,’ Hibbard confesses, “but this kitchen is more or less it. And it just works.”

They’re offering a huuuuge menu, considering the spatial constraints. Talks of expanding into a bigger space are in the works, Hibbard adds, but nothing’s set in stone yet. For now, he seems thrilled to have landed where he is.

“So, initially, I was trying to buy this cocktail bar on Orcas Island for ages, and, uh, it didn’t happen. And then my very good friend Dusty [Johnson], who owns Lander Coffee Roasters and State Street, said he wanted to show me this space in Tacoma, and at first I said I didn’t wanna. But when I took a look, the owner had just finished the build-out and the place was just gorgeous. I decided right there.”

In a nutshell, Hibbard says, the first concept for Field Bar is still very present, even if the form has changed. “I just really wanted to do my own thing, whatever that thing was. I was working in Seattle restaurants for a long time too, and so Field Bar was a concept of mixing those really, really professional Seattle vibes and hospitality and care, really high-quality product, really thoughtful sourcing and heavy prep, with the agricultural farming background from Orcas. Bringing those things together into something very intentional is what I wanted to do.” He’s still employing his habit of hyper-local sourcing, as he did back on Orcas. The long list of farms and producers he and Hippensteel use appears at the end of the menu and includes but isn’t limited to Pink Moon Farm in Eatonville, Local Color Farm in Puyallup, and Grit City Farm here in Tacoma.

I devoured my lovely jewelescent kale salad and hummus crudité plate, but… looking around the room afterward, I feel like I might have messed up by sleeping on the entrees. Someone has a whole entire butterflied trout glazed with Turkish chili, served alongside garbanzos and pickled fennel and Castelvetrano olives, with its llitte roasted head still on, and I’m furious with jealousy. How am I supposed to choose when we come back for dinner? When there’s this AND bone-in lamb? Which I already know the smell of and cannot forget? And how much time do I have left to eat both of them?

Hippensteel reiterates, “Yeah, who knows? I’m actually amazed that we were able to get that rainbow trout! It’s basically rapid fire around here as soon as things come into season. The menus in the spring and summer go real fast.”

You heard the man. Better hurry in.