In dining rooms around the world, oysters have become as standard as popcorn at the movies. Served glistening on platters, they continue to sell even as their price climbs. New York City restaurants routinely serve a half-dozen for $24. But it’s the price of oysters in London that will catch people’s attention. At Bentley’s Oyster Bar & Grill, the clubby, century-old seafood house off Regent Street, a single Kelly oyster from Galway, Ireland, goes for £9 ($11). Can any one bivalve be that delicious?
Bentley’s Kelly isn’t covered in caviar or sprinkled with 24-karat gold flakes. It’s a variety of native oyster, a species indigenous to shallow waters in Europe, Great Britain and Ireland. The reason for the eye-opening price tag is that the mollusks are rarely farmed, because they take almost six years to mature—not unlike a fine wine. (The more common rock oysters, which originally came from the Pacific Ocean, take about two years.)
Natives are available from September to April and then they’re gone: It’s illegal to harvest them in the warm summer months when they reproduce, which means you’ve got about two weeks left to try one that’s already been pulled from the sea. Otherwise, your next opportunity will be the end of summer. At Bentley’s, head shucker Federico Fiorillo says the restaurant spends more than £3 for each Kelly oyster and one-sixth of them have to be discarded when they don’t meet Fiorillo’s quality standards.
In an oyster beauty contest, the Kelly wouldn’t win any prizes. It doesn’t have the craggy, dramatic look of its deep-pocketed, tapered relatives; it looks more like an oyster that wants to be a clam, with a round, relatively flat and unremarkable shell. And the taste isn’t notably briny, unlike the oysters that make you feel as if you’re standing in the ocean as you slurp.
Instead, the Irish oyster has a meaty and nuanced taste that stays with you for several minutes. Not unlike that fine wine, it’s an experience more than a mouthful. And like some of the more rarefied vintages I’ve sampled, it’s not my new favorite. When it comes to oysters, I will take briny fresh over complex meatiness every day. But it’s absolutely worth tasting something that’s been hanging out in mineral-rich water for years, until it’s shepherded to the shucker.
“They’re basically a foodie’s oyster, but they also represent tradition, they represent history,” says Bobby Groves, head of oysters at André Balazs Properties, including Chiltern Firehouse in London, Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles and Sunset Beach on Shelter Island, New York. At Chiltern, the natives are sourced from West Mersea in Essex and sell for a relatively inexpensive £6.
“They come from old Roman fishing grounds that reflect 2,000 years of oyster heritage,” says Groves, who’s also the author of Oyster Isles: A Journey Through Britain and Ireland’s Oysters. If you’re comparing the distinctiveness of natives to rock oysters, he adds, “rock oysters are chicken; natives are pheasant.”
And they are, he says, selling extremely well from his oyster cart in the Chiltern courtyard, with glasses of Champagne and dry rieslings: “There’s a big rush for them right now. People want to celebrate them while they’re here.”
Likewise, the £9 Kellys are popular at Bentley’s, which sells 500 to 600 of them a week; out of about 10,000 total weekly oyster sales, around 3,000 are native, although they make up only a quarter of the list.
“Kellys are one of the most intense sea experiences you can have, the best of the best, the beluga caviar of the oyster world,” says Fiorillo. “They’re not profitable; they’re on the menu for prestige.”
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