New York's Best Roasted Oysters
Plus: a short review of Da Toscano, and an essay on food journalism as Trump's immigration crackdown begins
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The joy of roasted oysters: a diversion of sorts
There are “three kinds of oyster-eaters,” M.F.K. Fisher wrote nearly a century ago. It was a line that almost suggests we’re about to read a BuzzFeed personality quiz.
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There are those who eat oysters raw, “and only raw,” Fisher wrote. This is the predominant class of consumers in New York, folks who slurp cold shells at brasseries and seaside shacks.
Then, there are those who only eat them cooked, “and no way other.” I hope to meet one of those rare humans one day, perhaps in a fictional corner of Bushwick where people pray to tinned shellfish.
But there is still another group — the one that I identify with the most. Those folks are “loose-minded sports who will eat anything, hot, cold, thin, thick, dead or alive, as long as it is oyster.” Those folks “may perhaps have the most fun,” Fisher wrote.
I can confirm the fun, lol, as I drink warm oyster liquor laced with scallion kimchi at Lola’s in Flatiron.
Fisher made these observations as part of her seminal “Consider the Oyster,” a 1941 book that feels more relevant than ever in 2025. It is a fine primer on shellfish, food writing, and how to make readers feel just a little bit uncomfortable — before bringing them back to a delicious place.
Fisher’s book has been bouncing around in my head recently as our city’s oyster scene continues to evolve. These past few years, more and more restaurants are serving them not just chilled, bistro-style, but also roasted, often in the way one might encounter in New Orleans, or at some forward looking aqua farm in Northern California.
I know some of my fellow New Yorkers are skeptical. You shun even a squirt of lemon, as if it might adulterate or ceviche the shellfish, which can cost $5 per slurp in Manhattan. For you, I’d advise spending an evening with Fisher and her prose.
She will make you hungry for warm oysters.
Believe her when she says that there is “no pleasanter frolic” on an autumn evening than an impromptu roast. She recommends hastily throwing a bunch of bivalves into the fire. Here is her recipe:
“Season the oyster…with pepper-sauce and butter, or pepper, salt, and vinegar in lieu of the sauce, and you have the very aroma of this pearl of bivalves, pure and undefiled.”
After you’re through with that, go eat some roasted oysters around the city. I’ve had them warmed over wood fires with wobbly bone marrow. I’ve had them grilled over binchotan coals with copper-colored onions. And I’ve seen them come out of pizza ovens, oozing black pepper butter.
During a trip to Da Toscano last week, I knocked back half a dozen slathered in crab fat. The half shells flaunted a sweet coastal perfume, while chiles and butter transformed the oyster’s liquor into a tiny cup of crimson soup.
One of the magical things about warming up a Blue Point or an Island Creek is witnessing how it can taste even more deeply of the sea than a cold one. A raw East coast oyster smacks of chilly ocean water; a good warm one feels just as slippery, but the heat plumps it up just so. The coals amplify the flavors. The oyster looks like a warm tidal pool and it smells of sunbaked sand. And hot butter.
One of the magical things about reading Fisher is how she lets us feel so many of these things vicariously. Here, she lets us experience the cooling and warming notes of an oyster in a single sentence, and she does it in a line so cutting and visceral that it almost reads like the final events of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”
“Its chilly, delicate gray body slips into a stewpan or under a broiler or alive down a red throat, and it is done.”
On mixing pleasure with pain in food journalism
Haenyeo in Park Slope is an excellent place to try warm oysters.
Jenny Kwak is one of the city’s OG members of the Modern Korean movement, and she’s been serving excellent roasted Wellfleets with seaweed butter since 2019. I tried them again last week with a cold beer and let me tell you: That is a proper snack.
Kwak pairs her oysters with toast, so you can soak up all the luscious dairy. Not enough oyster-roasting restaurants provide this starchy courtesy.
M.F.K. Fisher knew about the importance of bread. In “Consider the Oyster,” she wrote about toast with buttered oyster stews, cream of oyster soup, and oysters á la Foch. Warm oysters need toast!
But Fisher took pains to argue that any “self-respecting” restaurant serving raw oysters should pair them with pumpernickel-style bread and sweet butter. She actually goes on an Eater-style rant about this for a few paragraphs, and she kicks off the argument by saying that she had considered this matter seriously, while “incendiary bombs fell and people I knew were maimed and hungry…”
And then…wait, what?
Exuberant food writing does not have a tendency to mix culinary delights with references to deadly explosives, hunger, or battlefield injuries.
Actually, forgive me, I’m toning things down by stating them that way.
“Incendiary bombs,” were the words Fischer used, a reference to weapons that set fire to objects or people. They can burn through skin straight down to nerves and organs. They can induce respiratory injuries, including suffocation, through a combination of heat and carbon monoxide. Perhaps you’ve heard of these substances, including napalm, thermite, or white phosphorous. Incendiary devices were what helped the Germans kill 43,000 U.K. civilians during The Blitz.
Incendiary devices are what created the firestorm that helped kill at least 25,000 during the Allied bombing of Dresden.
But here’s the thing. Fisher, after she mentions the bombs, goes back to talking about bread. And “lusty” bits of nourishment. And pearls. She does not revisit incendiary devices again through her 96 pages.
This style of writing shouldn’t surprise you if you’ve ever read Fisher’s World War II missive, “How to Cook a Wolf.” It’s a detailed and often darkly humorous account of eating not just for survival, but also for a certain amount of joy — during periods of scarcity, food price inflation, and blackouts.
“Oyster,” by contrast, was published nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, and even longer before rationing began. It’s a book about epicurean pleasures. It’s about things with cream, butter, sherry, and saffron. It’s about making people happy.
It’s about nostalgia for the “Good Old Days.”
“Consider the Oyster” is not where you expect to encounter a line about bombs — and again, they are bombs so hot that they can penetrate human bone. And yet, that’s precisely why the reference feels so vital. For a split second in the middle of a sentence, Fisher takes a break from dreamy, literary food writing — the type of prose that so many of us crave during good times and bad — and throws a cold cup of water over all our faces.
Another Fisher line from the same book comes to mind. “Often the place and the time help make a certain food what it becomes, even more than the food itself.” She was actually talking about culinary superlatives, like why someone would consider a melon the “best” ever (that age-old debate). But her quote holds true in a greater sense. It makes me ask myself this:
How could Fisher, who loved oysters, and who loved Europe, not write about the bombs killing so many people across the continent?
The power of reviews versus news in covering Trump
There’s something to be said for throwing a proverbial cup of cold water in any good art form.
If you’ve seen any of Spike Lee’s films, you probably knew that “BlackKKKlansman” was going to be more than a buddy cop flick with John David Washington and Adam Driver. But few things could’ve prepared you for the graphic, documentary footage of the white supremacist Charlottesville rally and deadly car attack that Lee tacked onto the epilogue.
And if you’ve read the Pete Wells review of TsuruTonTan, you probably knew you were going to get more than an account of what to order or skip; you knew that there would be insightful context, like with any good review. But you might not’ve predicted the closing paragraphs — written after the first election of Donald Trump — which expressed fear about the “snarling hostility to immigrants now at loose in the country.”
Food journalists often file news reports and moving essays that deal with the intersection of the food world and major world events. Like the pandemic. And the Los Angeles Fires. And the starvation in Gaza. And the killing of food aid workers by IDF strikes. And the rising food prices we keep seeing everywhere.
Writing about these events is part of our job, and so you’ll likely see more of this coverage for the next four years. That’s all the more true given a snarling hostility to immigrants now at loose within the second Trump administration — a presidency that appears ready to deport people who are authorized to temporarily live and work here, in our restaurants and elsewhere. A presidency that systematically wields fear as a weapon against immigrants participating in public life, warning of “collateral arrests” of law-abiding people in sanctuary cities.
A president whose racist, nativist rhetoric stands in direct contrast to the values of our country and the people who sacrifice so much — often, for little pay — to feed us.
People are scared to go to work right now.
So sometimes, you’ll see longer articles on these subjects here on The Lo Times. But sometimes, you’ll see shorter mentions tucked within columns. I like the notion of someone skipping an essay on deportations before suddenly having to grapple with that same issue when I bring it up in a steakhouse review. A review people read to find out if the prime rib is any good.
I also appreciate the thought of casually perusing a restaurant review two years from now and unexpectedly getting a sobering reminder of the world in which we lived, rather than skimming yet another bland missive from the Corporate Listicle Machine.
If undocumented folks make up such a vital component of our food systems, it would be a mistake to overlook their plight in some of our most-read columns, like recipes, city guides, and reviews — evergreen pieces that people will seek out years later. That advice is especially true for food media sites that don’t cover news at all.
One could make these same arguments for scores of other issues, including the devastating inflation of the past few years. Price is where the decision on whether to eat out (or whether to eat at all) begins and ends for so many. I’ll do my best to cover that issue too within reviews, like I always have.
This doesn’t mean we need to bring up uncomfortable matters in every single column. A restaurant critic wouldn’t be very good at their job if they were the person that no one wants to talk to at the party. Indeed, writers can still be escapist or delightful during tough times. If Fisher could make quips about personal freezers doubling as storage for blood plasma during the war, and if she could make jokes about nuclear explosions irradiating fish, lol, I think we, as a writing community, can find ways to keep thing light. We always do!
But I maintain these are all the types of stories — if told well — that are relevant and compelling to everyone. Regardless of whom we voted for.
Remember: Fisher snuck in that line about incendiary bombs in early 1941, an era where isolationist tendencies held quite a bit of sway domestically. Perhaps you’ve heard of the ol’ America First Committee? If Fisher could publish that single line back then, maybe a few more of us could be more frank about what we’re all up against with Trump 2.0.
Sometimes, it takes an essay. Sometimes, a line or two is a good place to start, after which we can get back to the fatty steaks and briny oysters — even if it means writing or reading about nice things with an unquiet conscience.
Consider the downside if we simply keep quiet.
Here’s a précis of M.F.K. Fisher’s “The Gastronomical Me” written by Dana Velden in 2014:
“Cleverly and a little mischievously, she distracts us into thinking she is writing about food and the pleasures of eating. But pick up The Gastronomical Me, one of her most famous food memoirs, and you will also be reading about war, sex, infidelity…poverty, race, violence, feminism, class and privilege, divorce, addiction, love, passion, gender, death, suffering, grief.”
Please read this column on the Los Angeles fires by Tejal Rao. And then go read this piece by Bill Addison. I’ll do my best to write more about those two missives — and about the fires, again — in future newsletters.
Check out these 10 places for roasted oysters!
Scroll down for a short review of Da Toscano, followed by notes on other great warm bivalves at Lola’s, Haenyeo, Strange Delight, Lord’s, Hawksmoor, Penny, and elsewhere. We also mention a few more places for oysters Rockefeller!
Da Toscano | Crab Butter oysters and shellfish pastas
Michael Toscano ran one of my favorite Italian restaurants of the 2010s…