18
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EVERYDAY
JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2014
This 90-year-old Magazine Street restaurant is famous for its raw
oysters and fried oyster loaf made with thick-cut white bread.
Oysters Rockefeller serverd in Antoine’s Rex Room – photo by
Cheryl Gerber
Fried, stewed or nude! The walls of Wintzell's Oyster House are covered in hundreds of J. Oliver
Wintzell’s witty sayings.
photo by
Cheryl Gerber
Uptown, at Casamento’s (4330 Magazine St.), the
floor-to-ceiling tiles reflecting the florescent bulbs
can make one feel like you’re eating a tray of oysters
in an oversized, ornate bathtub. While building his
restaurant in 1919, Joe Casamento realized a tile-
bedecked surface would make for a sparkling-clean
oyster house. That quality of spotlessness extends to
the oyster bar, where the unshucked shells are stored
not, as in most places, on slowly-melting ice but in a
cold stainless-steel bin, keeping their briny-sweetness
intact. Whether you’re waiting for a table or not, come
to stand near the oyster vault, throw some dollars in the
tip jar, and order a dozen.
In southwest Louisiana, the tiny town of Abbeville
can boast of it’s own outsized oyster culture. The
horseshoe-shaped bar at Dupuy’s Oyster Shop (108 S.
Main St.) has been around for nearly a century-and-a-
half. Established in 1869 by oysterman Joseph Dupuy,
his namesake bar and restaurant survives in its original
location overlooking the Vermillion River. It was here
that Dupuy, and ensuing oyster luggers, sold their cargo,
sometimes at the price of a nickel for a dozen bivalves.
Further afield, in downtown Mobile, Alabama, Wintzell’s Oyster House (605
Dauphin St.) has been peddling oysters three ways, “fried, stewed, and nude,”
since 1938. Founded by J. Oliver Wintzell, a cigar-chopping character with a
knack for humorous aphorisms, as a six-stooled bar with the owner’s witty bon
mots canvasing the walls, his namesake restaurant is now a chain stretching as
far north as Pittsburgh.
For the past several years, my favorite place to grab a dozen is
the marble-topped counter at Pascal’s Manale Restaurant (1838
Napoleon Ave.). I keep returning for the stiltedly non-sensical
rules (pay cash for a red token at the bar, which you then exchange
for a dozen at the oyster counter); the raw oysters, always fleshy
and sea-sweet; and oyster shucker Thomas “Uptown T” Stewart.
Stewart serves his half-shells one after another, rather than a dozen
simultaneously, thus granting time to savor each oyster individually,
while also bestowing the opportunity to take in his sweetly chatty
and stirringly optimistic persona. He cultivates the belief that
each oyster is the very best you could slurp down on that very day.
Whenever I visit — in and out of season, alone or with a crowd —
and no matter what I call them, Stewart makes me feel that every
oyster he serves has been pulled from the Gulf just for me.
