Gulf oysters run through the DNA of New Orleans dining in a way that is hard to explain to people from landlocked places. The four bars below cover the spectrum from century-old Italian tile rooms to laid-back sports bars, but they share the same commitment to freshly shucked local shellfish eaten close to where they were harvested.
Casamento’s Restaurant
Joe Casamento emigrated from the small Sicilian island of Ustica and opened his restaurant on Magazine Street in 1919, covering it floor to ceiling in Italian tile that has stayed intact for over a century. The restaurant still closes every June, July, and August in observance of the old rule that oysters should only be eaten in months ending in the letter R, and reopens in September when the Gulf oysters are back in peak condition. That seasonal discipline is either an anachronism or a statement of principle depending on who you ask, and the regulars largely treat it as both.
The oyster bar sits just past the entrance on the left, where shuckers work through orders of raw oysters on the half shell while customers stand at the counter and eat them with a Dixie beer chaser. The oyster loaf, a fried oyster sandwich built on toasted bread rather than French bread, has been called the best in New Orleans by multiple publications across multiple decades. The charbroiled oysters, oyster stew, and fried soft-shell crab round out a menu that barely needs anything else.
Casamento’s is at 4330 Magazine Street, open Thursday and Friday from 11am to 2pm and 5:30pm to 9pm, Saturday from 11am to 2pm and 5:30pm to 9pm, and Sunday from 4:30pm to 8:30pm. Closed June through August. Call (504) 895-9761 for current seasonal status.
Pascal’s Manale
Frank Manale bought a corner grocery store at Napoleon Avenue and Dryades Street in 1913 and turned it into Manale’s Restaurant, which passed through four generations of the DeFelice family before joining the Dickie Brennan & Co. restaurant group in 2023. What makes Pascal’s Manale a point of civic pride rather than just a very old restaurant is that the BBQ shrimp was invented here in the 1950s, a dish in which whole shrimp are cooked in a pepper-butter sauce that has nothing to do with barbecue and everything to do with the Italian-Creole cooking tradition that defined this corner of Uptown…