Oyster Night

The Harbor Grill printed a passage of Hemingway at the top of its oyster menu, which tells you the restaurant knew exactly what it was selling. Six preparations, raw and cooked, with three wines chosen to sit beside them.

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and make plans.

— Ernest Hemingway, quoted at the head of the restaurant's oyster menu

The six preparations

The list was deliberately broad: two classics from the American oyster-house tradition, one fried, one raw, one from Southeast Asia and one from the Gulf. A table of four could order all six and eat their way across a century of oyster cookery in one sitting, which is presumably the point.

Oysters Rockefeller

Baked with butter, an anise-flavoured liqueur, fresh celery, chervil, spinach and shallots, then topped with aged parmesan. The version most restaurants serve is a green, spinach-heavy descendant of a New Orleans original whose actual recipe was never published; the chervil and the anise note here put the Grill's rendition closer to the classical end of the family than most.

Oysters casino

Baked and stuffed with onion, green pepper and celery, with a blend of zesty seafood seasoning and chopped bacon. The other great American baked oyster, and the more forgiving of the two — bacon and pepper carry an oyster that raw service would not flatter.

Fried oysters

Deep fried and served with the house spicy cornichon tartar sauce. This one also held a permanent place at the top of the dinner menu's appetiser list at $14.95, which is a good sign that it was the one people actually ordered.

Oysters on the half shell, with a trio of sauces

Freshly shucked and served raw with a sweet Maui onion salsa, a Hawaiian mignonette and a cocktail sauce. Three sauces for one plate of raw oysters is generous, and the composition is pure Pacific-facing California: the classical French mignonette, the American cocktail sauce, and a sweet onion salsa that belongs to neither.

Thai steamed oyster basket

Steamed with fresh ginger, garlic, shallots and red Thai chilli, garnished with cilantro. The most unusual item on the list and the one that most clearly bears the fingerprints of a kitchen that had been told to go and look at other cuisines.

Louisiana style barbecued oysters

Grilled and brushed with the house Louisiana-style barbecue sauce. Grilled over the same mesquite fire that did the fish — see the mesquite grill — which gave them a wood note that a broiler cannot produce.

The wines poured alongside

Three wines were printed on the oyster page itself rather than left to the main list, which is the mark of a section somebody had thought about.

All three are high-acid and low-oak, which is the correct instinct. The chenin-viognier blend is the interesting choice — aromatic enough to stand up to the Thai basket and the barbecued oysters, where a lean sauvignon would disappear. The full cellar is on the drinks list.

Thursday Oyster Day

In the restaurant's later years the section acquired a fixed weekly slot and a fixed price. Thursday was Oyster Day: half a dozen for $10.95, in any of the six preparations, all day and all night. The About page repeated it as a standing instruction — and remember, every Thursday is our special Oyster Day — and the promotion sat on the front of the site through the final era.

Turning the list into a weekly ritual was a shrewd move. It gave the kitchen a predictable Thursday order, gave the room a reason to fill on the least reliable night of the week, and gave regulars a standing appointment. It is also the thing former guests mention most often.

Where the oysters came from

The menu did not name beds, which was normal for a restaurant of this kind and era. Almost all oysters served in American restaurants are farmed rather than wild, and shellfish aquaculture on both coasts is documented in detail by NOAA Fisheries. Raw shellfish service also carries handling obligations that a restaurant serving them six days a week has to take seriously; the federal baseline is published in the FDA's guidance on selecting and serving seafood.