The Grand Central Oyster Bar and Restaurant is a landmark within a landmark. This living encyclopedia of seafoods, this Fort Knox of fish houses, has been doing business for 88 years deep in the bowels of the Grand Central terminal.
It opened in 1913, when Grand Central did, and retains the ambiance, atmosphere and spirit of that time. Its vault-like Gustavino glazed white tile ceiling, massive light trimmed columns, ship’s wheel lighting fixtures, expansive counter top eating area, wonderfully old fashioned 23-seat Oyster Bar and warm, woody saloon, complete with swinging doors, stuffed fish, portholes and nautical wall hangings, mark it as a place from another era.
They literally don’t build restaurants like this anymore. Its scope and size are no less than staggering.
This sprawling 27,000 square foot restaurant presents a daily hand-written menu containing around 75 seafood dishes to about 1,800 diners every day. The Oyster Bar serves 25 to 30 different varieties of oysters daily, and shovels out over two million annually. The 500 square foot smokehouse is just a small section of a kitchen that also contains an in-house bake shop that churns out 3,000 biscuits and fourteen desserts daily. Four hundred thousand customers consume more than 1.7 million pounds of fresh seafood a year, and they wash it down with 240 different bottles and 70-80 different glasses of wine. (Regulars sometimes lunch on Champagne, oysters and cheesecake).
All of this would mean nothing if the food and service didn’t measure up to the surroundings. But they do and that is the most remarkable accomplishment of the Oyster Bar. Huge restaurants are rarely great restaurants. Often the diner (and the careful preparation of food) is lost in the shuffle, turn-over, and pace of such mass production spots.
Not so at the Grand Central Oyster Bar and Restaurant, a place that has never lost its focus and, most of all, its dedication.
On a recent visit our waiter said, “If you like oysters, this is the place.” Our Maitre d remarked, “Oysters are our bread and butter so to speak” and a press release claims, “at the Grand Central Oyster Bar, all the world’s your oyster.” Indeed the Oyster Bar lives up to its name delivering oysters a zillion ways: raw, fried, poached, broiled, steamed in chowders, pan roasts and stews.
After ripping into the basket of warm biscuits, sourdough rolls, boards and oyster crackers that had been placed on our red and white checkered tablecloth within moments of being seated, we sampled four oyster specialties of the house. A luxuriant, memorable New England clam chowder sporting strandsónot sliversóof clams, a combination pan roast dense with clams, scallops, lobster claws and shrimp as well as oysters swimming in a rich, creamy paprika kissed broth and a colossal platter of a dozen pristine oysters on the half shell.
The last yielded extra large Belons from Maine the size of small steaks, slim, smooth Glidden Points with a delicate texture and dainty, sweet Pacific varieties that were no bigger than a thimble. Four poached Wellfleets on a wild mushroom base, napped in an intoxicating beurre blanc sauce, were virtually inhaled within seconds of being served.
Not so for two crab cakes that, according to one diner, were either “crab balls or pregnant crab cakes.” Two Rieslings meshed well with the briny fare (only rarely seen on American lists; there are 12 here).
A lighter-than-air key lime pie and an opulent American cheesecake covered by strawberry coulis are sweets I’d order again at The Oyster Bar.
Grand Central Terminal, lower level, 42nd Street btw. Vanderbilt & Lexington Aves., 212-490-6650.
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