For oyster lovers, there is nothing like New Orleans.
The stylistic variety of raw oyster bars across the metro area is wide and under heralded. And in no other city will you find as many cooked oyster dishes as you do on New Orleans restaurant menus.
The reason for this is simple: Louisiana regularly leads the nation in commercially harvested oyster landings, even as the industry navigates environmental challenges affecting the Gulf of Mexico.
The oyster bounty is a reliable source of pleasure to locals. But for visitors in town for the Super Bowl, New Orleans’s idiosyncratic oyster culture could use some explanation.
While local oysters are technically the same species as those on the East Coast, they grow larger here. Their size — which makes them better suited to cooking — and abundance is why home cooks and restaurant chefs have embraced them for generations.
Raw oyster eaters accustomed to the smaller, more uniform oysters from elsewhere are often startled by the girth of traditional Louisiana oysters. But the size and flavor of local oysters are never more attractive as they are now, in the winter months. And the diversity of options at New Orleans raw bars, both locally grown and imported, has exploded.
This guide will help you navigate what’s out there, whether it’s raw or cooked.
Where the Shucking Is a Show
Thomas Stewart, who has been shucking oysters at Pascal’s Manale (established in 1913) for 35 years, is arguably the most famous oyster shucker in New Orleans. The fact that such a distinction exists should tell you something about the city’s oyster bar culture. He answers to Uptown T, as you’ll learn if he happens to drop some rhymes (e.g. “If I say 3-D/You step back/Relax/Cause you gonna see me/Uptown T”). The oysters are always local, often from nearby St. Bernard Parish. Mr. Stewart slides each across the standing-only, shell-worn, marble bar as soon as they’re shucked, some carrying a bit of mud from the shallows where they were dredged. Mr. Stewart represents a showbiz-adjacent oyster sucking tradition that is also on display in the French Quarter (see below) and at Mr. Ed’s Oyster Bar & Fish House. Jay Gallet, the son of Cajun oyster fishers, will blow your mind with his speed at Superior Seafood, on St. Charles Avenue.
The French Quarter
The unofficial epicenter of raw oyster consumption in Louisiana is the busy corner of Bourbon and Iberville streets. Four oyster bars are clustered there. Acme Oyster House (pictured) celebrated its centennial at this location last year. Felix’s opened across the street in 1948 — its shuckers open 10,000 oysters on a busy day. Both are joyous, sometimes bawdy, like the neighborhood they help to define. Bourbon House and Red Fish Grill, each less than a block away, are modern New Orleans seafood restaurants with lively oyster bars. Together these restaurants employ more than 30 people at their oyster bars alone. All have lifted spirits in a part of the French Quarter targeted in the terrorist attack on New Year’s Day.
The raw bar at Pêche Seafood Grill reflects the changing oyster landscape along the Gulf Coast. This revered, border-pushing seafood restaurant offers cultivated oysters from Louisiana and Alabama, which are smaller and have a more consistent flavor profile across seasons than wild Gulf oysters (also on offer here). Your cold seafood comes arranged on an iced tray, along with whichever of the daily ceviches and crudos you order, as you should. The raw bar menu is similarly cosmopolitan at Coquette, a creative Uptown bistro with an invitingly long bar.
Oysters From Beyond the Gulf
New Orleans raw bars featuring oysters from locations other than the Gulf of Mexico are a 21st century phenomenon that roughly coincides with the spread of oyster-centric seafood restaurants across the country. Fives is an attractive and illustrative recent example of the species. A circular bar occupies most of the space, located just off Jackson Square in the French Quarter. The design is partially inspired by Maison Premiere, the Brooklyn cocktail-and-raw bar that explicitly evokes old New Orleans. The menu is similarly affected by stimuli from what locals refer to as the other coasts. Cultivated Gulf oysters are featured alongside East Coast and Canadian varieties, while shiso-flavored tuna crudo rubs elbows with Royal Red shrimp cocktails. The raw bar offerings range from East to the West at Sidecar Patio & Oyster Bar, connected to the Rusty Nail bar, and Seaworthy, both in the Warehouse District. Pigeon and Whale is a playful Uptown seafood restaurant with the widest selection of imported and local oysters in town.
The first thing you’ll notice at Casamento’s is the tiles covering the exterior as well as the dining room. They were imported from the founder Joseph Casamento’s native Italy and remain fundamental to the atmosphere of a restaurant that feels a little like a drained swimming pool. Casamento’s is closed June through August, a remnant of the pre-refrigeration days (when summer was the off season for Louisiana oysters) but also a mark of the attention to quality that has driven this restaurant since its founding in 1919. Freshly shucked raw oysters are essential here, but you’ll also want at least one oyster loaf, a Casamento’s original sandwich built from buttered, thick-cut white bread and oysters pan-fried in lard by C.J. Gerdes, Mr. Casamento’s grandson and the restaurant’s third generation co-owner. If you’re looking to slurp back a dozen in a uniquely New Orleans space, but with more elbow room, head to Cooter Brown’s, a sports bar with roadhouse vibes in the Riverbend neighborhood.
Baked and Roasted
Local chefs have been trying to add value to Louisiana oysters at least since the late 19th century, when Antoine’s introduced an oyster dish so rich it could only be called Rockefeller. That restaurant — the oldest in New Orleans — is still serving oysters baked on the half shell under a cloak of green herbs, aromatics and breadcrumbs. As is Galatoire’s (pictured above), whose downstairs dining room is essentially a time capsule with tuxedoed waiters and a French-Creole menu that hasn’t changed much since it opened in 1905. There are countless iterations of baked and roasted oysters served across the city today. At Saffron Nola, a New Orleans-Indian bistro, they’re roasted with caramelized onions and curry leaf, with naan on the side.
The Famed Charbroiled Oyster
Visiting Drago’s without ordering charbroiled oysters would be a little like riding to the top of the Empire State Building without opening your eyes to the view. The seafood restaurant of Croatian lineage — the original is in suburban Metairie, and there’s a location in the downtown Hilton — is famous for the dish. And it’s that good: live fire sizzles the oysters in their shells with butter, garlic and herbs, while singeing grated Italian hard cheese into a light crust. Today it’s hard to find an oystercentric restaurant that doesn’t serve charbroiled oysters. They’re the main attraction at Neyow’s Creole Café, in Mid City, and very good at Basin Seafood (order some crawfish pupusas while you’re there). MeMe’s Bar & Grille, downriver in St. Bernard Parish, features four different versions, including one topped with bacon and blue cheese.
Mosca’s is an unassuming-looking Creole-Italian restaurant on the other side of the Mississippi River, close to the swamp in fact and spirit but still only a half-hour’s drive from the French Quarter. Oysters Mosca come in shallow round platters, blazing hot from the oven. It’s packed with fat oysters, bound together with a garlic-and-cheese breadcrumb paste that forms a chestnut brown top crust over the whole thing. What doesn’t look like much, spooned onto your plate, amounts to a spectacular seafood casserole. Oysters Gabie at Gabrielle, a venerable Cajun-Creole bistro, is a somewhat daintier entry in a rich tradition, laced with artichoke and pancetta. The poached oysters appetizer at Bistro Daisy, a favorite of locals near Audubon Park, is not technically a gratin, though the crushed croutons sprinkled over the top nod to the gratin genre.
Fried Oysters
Most New Orleanians keep a mental list of reasons they can’t imagine leaving. Fried oysters are commonly on it. Tana, a flashy, year-old restaurant in nearby Jefferson Parish, serves many excellent, modern takes on Sicilian-New Orleans cuisine. The fried oyster appetizer draws on the local variant of Bordelaise, typically built from butter, olive oil, garlic and herbs and normally found glossing a plate of spaghetti. The chef Michael Gulotta innovates on the tradition, emulsifying the sauce and adding Aleppo pepper and fennel to the mix. Fury’s is a classic neighborhood Creole-Italian place. Its oysters are more typical of what you find at local seafood joints: fried to order and mounded against a thicket of fries. Herbsaint, the great Warehouse District bistro-trattoria, pares back that traditional New Orleans fried oyster plate to its bare essentials: a handful of perfectly fried bivalves, escorted by a small ramekin of housemade hot sauce.
Only in New Orleans
Clancy’s mixes archetypal French-Creole dishes with house originals like the fried oysters covered in melted Brie. It is the kind of bodacious idea you can only imagine finding in a city that has historically regarded oysters as another opportunity to gild the lily. Take the oysters en brochette at Galatoire’s, a plate of bacon-wrapped, deep fried oysters swimming in lemon butter. Oysters Foch, at Antoine’s, brings fried oysters riding foie gras-slathered toast. Oyster artichoke soup is a lighter local staple that has faded from view in recent years. It’s still found at Mandina’s, in Mid City, and GW Fins, a reliable standby for fancy seafood in the Quarter.
