Search seafood near me in Williamsburg and Maison Premiere comes back looking like a period piece — a dim, marble-heavy room built around a horseshoe oyster bar, a back garden, an absinthe list and a cocktail programme with nineteenth-century pretensions. It commits to the bit completely, and underneath the styling is a genuinely serious raw bar with one of the better oyster lists in the city.
An oyster list with thirty names on it is useless without a way to read it. Ask Karpo how to choose across a raw bar list so you order a spread rather than six of the same thing.
How to read an oyster list
Nearly all the oysters on an American list are the same species — the Eastern oyster on the Atlantic side, the Pacific oyster on the west — and the differences between them come almost entirely from where they were grown. That is why lists are organised by place rather than by variety, and why the names refer to bays and inlets rather than to breeds.
The east-west split is the first thing to know. Atlantic oysters tend to be brinier, firmer and more mineral; Pacific oysters tend to be sweeter, softer and frequently melon- or cucumber-like. If you have only ever eaten one coast, ordering across both is the single most instructive thing you can do at a raw bar.
Within a coast, the variables are salinity, size and finish. Ask for three that are as different from each other as possible rather than picking names you recognise, and eat them from the mildest to the strongest. Anyone working an oyster bar will happily build that for you and would generally rather do that than shuck six of the same thing.
Practical oyster etiquette
Check the oyster is detached from the shell before lifting it — a small fork sorts that out and prevents the most common failure, which is losing half of it. Drink or eat the liquor in the shell; it is the seawater the oyster was living in and a significant part of the flavour.
Chew it. Swallowing an oyster whole is a widespread habit and it means you taste almost nothing, which rather defeats the exercise. Two or three chews releases the sweetness that follows the initial brine.
Use the mignonette sparingly and the hot sauce almost never. A shallot vinegar cuts richness in small amounts and drowns a delicate oyster in larger ones, and anything strongly flavoured on top of a good oyster is spending money to taste condiment.
The early hour is the whole strategy
Raw bars in this category almost universally run a discounted early period, and it changes the economics of the visit completely. The same oysters, shucked by the same person, cost a fraction of what they do two hours later, and the room is quiet enough to sit at the bar and be talked through the list.
That is the visit to plan for. Arrive at the start of the early period rather than in the middle of it, take seats at the bar rather than a table, and treat it as an early dinner rather than a preliminary to one. Later in the evening the room is genuinely lovely and the same order costs considerably more.
The back garden is the other reason to come and is weather-dependent in an obvious way. In the warmer months it is one of the better outdoor rooms in Brooklyn — ivy, a fountain, string lights — and it operates on a first-come basis more often than the dining room does.
Beyond the raw bar
The cooked side of the menu leans towards the Gulf Coast and New Orleans rather than New England, which is a slightly unexpected direction for a New York oyster bar and gives the kitchen somewhere to go beyond ice and shellfish. Anything involving butter, chilli and shellfish is generally the right instinct here.
The bar programme is serious and the absinthe selection is not a gimmick — it is served traditionally, dripped over sugar with cold water, which takes several minutes and is worth watching once. It is also strong, which people consistently underestimate. Please drink responsibly. Must be of legal drinking age.
Williamsburg around it is dense with places to continue, and the neighbourhood runs late. This is a good first stop of an evening rather than the whole of one, and the walk towards the waterfront afterwards is short.
Are oysters seasonal any more
The old rule about only eating oysters in months with an R in them dates from before refrigeration and before farming, and it was about two things: spoilage in warm weather, and the fact that wild oysters spawn in summer, which leaves them thin, milky and unpleasant to eat.
Refrigeration solved the first problem entirely. The second is largely solved by farming, and particularly by triploid oysters, which are bred not to spawn and therefore stay firm and sweet through the summer months. A good raw bar in July is selling oysters that are perfectly in condition.
What does still vary seasonally is character rather than quality. Cold water slows an oyster's metabolism, which concentrates glycogen and makes winter oysters noticeably sweeter and denser. If you have a choice, midwinter is when the same oyster from the same bed tastes best, and the difference is large enough to notice without being told.
Practical notes
Maison Premiere is an oyster bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with a horseshoe raw bar, a back garden and a long absinthe and cocktail list. Order across both coasts and ask for three oysters as different from each other as possible, eaten mildest first; chew them, drink the liquor, and go easy on the mignonette. Plan around the discounted early period, arrive at its start and sit at the bar. Take the garden in warm weather. The cooked menu leans towards the Gulf Coast, and absinthe is served traditionally and is stronger than it looks.
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Ask Karpo first
Raw bars are one of the few places where timing changes the price of the identical thing by half. Ask Karpo when the early hours run near you, which lists are worth the trip, and what to order once you are looking at thirty names you do not recognise.
