Le Bar à Huîtres
Coming back to my hotel room that first night, I saw a restaurant across the street with guys shucking oysters out on the sidewalk, and waiters bringing plates of them on ice into the dining room.
That really put me in the mood for oysters, and so I told business partners the next day I would like to eat seafood that night. They talked to one of their boys that knows Paris restaurants, and he gave them a recommendation.
After looking up the address they told me, "It looks like it is near your hotel."
I asked them the name, and sure enough, it was the same exact spot I had seen the night before!
Here is a picture of the shellfish shuckers while there was still some daylight:
Here's a link to the menu,
Le Bar à Huîtres (
warning, very annoying foghorn sound from that Web site periodically).
We got a bottle of pouilly fuse, they ordered fish, and I got the "Bar à Huîtres" platter for €33.50.
Quite a good deal. It came as a huge platter, with the seafood nestled among crushed ice. There were half a dozen oysters or so, two
belon oysters (which I found to be very tasty, more sweet than metallic), a crab, shrimp, clams, and mussels.
What I really liked, however, were the shellfish I had not had before.
First,
crevettes grises (translated literally as grey shrimp). These were very small shrimp (you can get the idea in
this image) maybe half an inch long. You can remove the head, but I was just popping them like sunflower seeds, eating shells and all.
Next novel item,
bulots. These
look like sea snails, gastropods in a spiral shell that you pull out with a fork. They were great dipped in aioli, but I enjoyed them on their own, also. The English word, I found out by looking at the menu, is a "whelk".
But the best new find were
bigorneaux, called whinkles in English. Similar to the whelks, but a lot
smaller, and the shells were black in color. You used a small metal needle to pull them out, and the meaty part was maybe a quarter inch long and an eighth of an inch in diameter. Once I got the hang of it, picking them out of the shell was as easy as eating them, and I ran through them quickly. They had a salty fresh seafood taste to them that was quickly addictive.
I very much enjoyed the meal the night before, but the element of discovery really made this meal special. I would love to go back and have it again if I have the chance.