Night is falling earlier, the weather is getting cooler and there’s the constant patter of acorns dropping from live oaks. These are all signals, of course, of the change in season, which in New Orleans means moving from crab to oyster.
With the start of the traditional oyster season, now well underway, harvests of oysters that simply taste better show up under shuckers’ knives across the city. Casamento’s Restaurant is open again after its summer hiatus and the year-round operations are serving up beauties that are just plumper, firmer and saltier than their summer cousins.
Oyster shuckers tell me this has to do with rainfall. Heavier rains in the spring and summer mean more fresh water washing through oyster beds. When the rains abate, the water over the beds becomes saltier. And since the simple digestive tract of the oyster proves the expression “you are what you eat,” the more briny the water that passes through an oyster in the bed, the saltier its taste when a shucker pries it apart for you on a marble bar.
Restaurateurs generally buy their oysters from the same brokers or the same fishermen, who in turn get their supply from the same beds week after week. But salinity levels can change radically day by day, even in the same oyster beds, depending on the direction of currents and rainfall. This helps explain why the oysters you eat at a restaurant one day can taste different on your next visit. So while restaurants cannot always control the salinity of their oysters, they can control the temperature and to my tastes, the colder they are the better.
That’s one reason I think so highly of the oysters at Casamento’s. The set up here is incomparable. The narrow front dining room can get awfully crowded during lunch but while waiting for a table, the shuckers will usually offer you a half-dozen or so as a starter. While standing there slurping them down, you get to see why they are so wonderfully cold. Most respectable oyster bars will keep piles of ice over the oysters they’re ready to shuck. But at Casamento’s they take it a step further with a freezer mounted right on the bar. Every few minutes, the shuckers open the old-fashioned, industrial-looking appliance and draw out a few dozen oysters with a metal rake that looks like something you would use to stoke a fire. The oysters rumble down the tile bar and are popped open in the shuckers’ thickly gloved hands.
The rest of Casamento’s atmosphere is classic all the way. Virtually every vertical or horizontal surface is covered in gleaming tile, save only the ceiling. This tile job extends through the kitchen, which is worth passing through just to see the ladies frying oysters and shrimp in big cast iron kettles. Some friends joke that all that tile reminds them of a bathroom. But to my eyes, the smooth, white walls look like the inside of an oyster shell, that pristine Cajun ivory hidden beneath the craggy exterior of the shell.
Another local oyster institution big on atmosphere is Pascal’s Manale. The oyster bar here stands alone, a little like an altar, in the restaurant’s barroom. The room is an oaky lounge where the walls are covered with nostalgic pictures and enormous shells from oysters of days long past. You order your oysters from the bartender, who gives you a poker chip that you then take over to the oyster bar to show how many you’ve paid for.
Pascal’s Manale doesn’t have the countertop freezer, but they dump so much ice over their oysters that they are nearly as cold as Casamento’s own when they hit the marble bar. The oysters here are cold enough that even as I drove away from Pascal’s Manale on a recent visit, my teeth were still pleasantly cold when I got home.
If you find yourself in Metairie, you can seek haven at Bozo’s Restaurant. The oysters here are excellent and the service feels like family, though without any of the grudges. The atmosphere is dark and clubby at the bar and kinky in the dining rooms, where the décor screams ’70s “rec room.” I prefer the bar, but either way Bozo’s is a wonderful refuge amid the sloppy, suburban disorder that surrounds it by the Causeway. Keep Bozo’s in mind if you shop at the nearby malls or big box retail outlets. A dozen raw oysters from Bozo’s can go a long way to restoring your soul after a mall experience and makes a much better lunch than anything you will get at the food courts and chain eateries.
I have never been to a chain restaurant with an oyster bar and that is undoubtedly a good thing for everyone involved. But New Orleans does have a locally-owned franchise, or sorts, that is growing based in large part on the quality of its raw oysters: Acme Oyster & Seafood House. They recently opened their fourth place, an outpost at the airport, which gives travelers either their first or last taste of local oysters and makes the possibility of delayed flights just a tad more bearable. The business expansion has done nothing to hurt the quality of its oysters, which I’ve always found top notch.
I know frequent visitors who have ritualized a trip to Acme’s original French Quarter location as their first stop whenever they come into town. I prefer Acme’s West End location to the French Quarter, however, if only for the view. Situated along the canals that service lakeside marinas, tables on the deck offer one of the very few waterside-dining experiences in a city otherwise inundated with water.
Just across Iberville Street from Acme’s French Quarter location is the side entrance for Felix’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar. The oysters here are fine, very cold and tasty, and the atmosphere is old time Quarter, with neon signs lighting the windows and shuckers hollering drink orders down the long bar. You will invariably be surrounded by tourists and, unless you talk like a Yat, you’re destined to be treated like one yourself. On a recent visit, an oyster shucker had to help a patron pronounce the names of both the beer he was drinking (“A-be-ta, not Abb-it-ta”) and the street his hotel was on (“chart-ers, not sha-tra”).
Which is all fine as long as you’re in on the joke. Felix’s is a good place to keep in mind when the urge for first class oysters hits you late at night. They usually stay open to midnight and often much later. It makes a great quick stop when you’re tearing through the Quarter and don’t want to fuss with waiting, reading menus or even sitting down.
And then there’s Le Bon Temps Roule, the Magazine Street bar and music hall. While few people think of this place for oysters, for one evening a week the back bar becomes the best bivalve deal in town. On Fridays only, usually starting around 7 p.m., they serve raw oysters for free. The shucker here, David, also works as a railroad mechanic and his forearms that make him look as though he could break open the oyster shells with his bare palms.
They are not the best oysters around, not by a long shot, and they are never cold enough for my taste. But their price, nothing more than what you tip the shucker, helps their appeal enormously.
REVIEWED THIS MONTH:
Acme Oyster & Seafood House: 724 Iberville, 522-5973; 7306; Lakeshore Drive, 282-9200; 519 E. Boston, Covington, 898-0667; Louis Armstrong International Airport.
Bozo’s Restaurant: 3117 21st Street, Metairie, 831-8666.
Casamento’s Restaurant: 4330 Magazine Street, 895-9761.
Felix’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar: 210 Bourbon Street, 522-4440.
Le Bon Temps Roule: 4801 Magazine Street, 895-8117.
Pascal’s Manale: 1838 Napoleon Ave. 895-4877 Le Bon Temps Roule: 4801 Magazine Street, 895-8117.
