Where to Eat Oysters in Boston and What to Order

An oyster menu in Boston reads like a list of small coastal towns, because that is exactly what it is. Learning to read it is the difference between ordering at random and ordering what you actually like.

The names are places

Oysters on a New England menu are usually sold by the bed they were farmed in, and the same species tastes markedly different depending on where it grew. Water temperature, salinity and the amount of tidal flushing all show up in the shell and in the flavour.

Broadly, and with plenty of exceptions:

Massachusetts and points north, including the well-known beds off Cape Cod and the towns along the South Shore, tend toward cold water, firmer meat and pronounced brine.

Wellfleet, from the Outer Cape, is the name most people recognise, and the reputation is earned: crisp, briny, clean.

Duxbury and its neighbours on the South Shore are farmed intensively and appear on menus across the city.

Island Creek, from Duxbury, is a name you will see repeatedly, both as an oyster and as a business with a presence in Boston restaurants.

Southern New England and Long Island Sound oysters, from warmer and often less salty water, tend to be sweeter and less aggressively briny.

How to order

Ask for a mixed dozen and ask the person shucking to arrange them from mildest to briniest. Almost anywhere worth eating oysters will do this happily, and it turns a plate into a tasting.

Eat them in that order, left to right. Your palate adjusts upward, so a delicate oyster after a very briny one tastes like nothing.

What to put on them

Less than you are given. A raw oyster arrives with mignonette, cocktail sauce, horseradish and lemon in most places, and using all of them means tasting sauce.

Try the first one entirely plain. Then a small amount of mignonette on the next if you want acid. Cocktail sauce, in the view of most people who eat a lot of oysters, is for masking, not for tasting.

Chew. Swallowing an oyster whole is common and wastes the point of it.

The R-month rule

The old advice to eat oysters only in months containing an R dates from before refrigeration and before farmed oysters, and it is largely obsolete for anything you will be served in a Boston restaurant.

There is a residual truth: oysters spawn in warm water and can be softer and milkier in high summer. That is a texture preference rather than a safety issue for farmed, properly handled shellfish.

Where to go

Rather than name specific restaurants, which change, use the signals. A place worth eating oysters has a visible shucking station, lists the beds by name rather than selling "oysters" generically, and can tell you when they came in.

If the menu says only "oysters, half dozen," with no origin, order something else. The absence of the name is the information.

A note on the rest of the plate

Oysters are the beginning of a New England raw bar, not the whole of it. Littlenecks, cherrystones and, in season, local crab and lobster are the natural companions. A raw bar plate for two with a mixed dozen and a few clams is one of the better meals this coast offers, and it does not require an expensive restaurant to be excellent.