Pearl Dive Oyster Palace

Jeff Black, who owns restaurants such as Addie’s, Black’s Bar & Kitchen, Black Market, and BlackSalt recently opened Pearl Dive Oyster Palace on 14th Street, a lone oyster shucking house on the DC corridor. Step in past the doors and you instantly get the feeling of having stepped into a weathered Cape Code restaurant that’s served hundreds of thousands of people over the decades, rather than a restaurant that’s just opened a not more than a couple of months ago. Indeed, every detail is put together to compose a tribute to the fresh seafood shacks of New England with reclaimed distressed wood walls to rickety chairs that feel as if they could collapse beneath you if you leaned at just the right angle in one.

The restaurant reads almost entirely of seafood dishes, which is great if you’re looking for food and not a discount warehouse for jewelry robbed from shelled mollusks. That being said, you shouldn’t shy away from the land dishes like the Braised Pork Cheeks. This dish explores the tenderness of the often overlooked pork cheek and complements it with a creamy bed of stone grits, flavored with a vibrant chipotle-ham hock broth.

For those looking to get down with the rawest of raw oysters, you’re in luck. The restaurant offers a wide array of varieties hailing from both the East and West coast, although having heard the server list out the different kinds twice, I simply noted that there were ‘regular priced’ ones and ‘more than regular priced’ ones.

Our table took a dozen of the former, and you know what? They tasted like raw oysters. Deliciously raw, with almost no discernible aftertaste, I would have gladly eaten the entire dozen myself if I weren’t sharing the plate with several others.

photo by Jonathan Bruskin

The cooked oysters are equally as good if not better, especially the Angels on Horseback. A quartet of oysters wrapped in strips of bacon and grilled, then served in a vin blanc and vinegar reduction. Amazing, succulent, and full of flavor. The salty slight crisp of the bacon exterior gives way to a juicy oyster inside, with the vinegar and vin blanc pulling the flavors together for possibly the best oyster dish I’ve ever had, although I might be slightly biased because of the bacon. I would, however, have several other suggestions for a renaming of this dish, including:

• Angels on Piggyback
• A Mermaid and a Pig Walk Into a Bar
• Unicorn Bacchanalias in your Mouth

photo by Jonathan Bruskin

I took it upon myself to be the judge of just how good the restaurant’s Oyster Po’boy was, but I needed a comparison ready at hand. Thankfully, the restaurant also offers a C.E.B.L.T. Po’boy (fried catfish, over easy egg, bacon, lettuce, tomato) and, being your diligent gastrohead, ordered both as my main course.

You might think of it as a little extreme, I just call it ‘a regular dinner’. The oysters used in the Oyster Po’boy (pictured in the foreground) as deep fried to a golden brown and served with housemade pickles, a spicy cayenne aioli, and served on Leidenheimer bread (THE bread to use for a Naw’lins Po’Boy) for something as good an authentic Po’Boy outside of Louisiana. It’s greatest challenge, by far, is that the C.E.B.L.T. is leaps and bounds better, with deep fried pallets of catfish, a creamy pocket yolk and strips of bacon to match.

Advantage, fish.

You’re given the option of having a side salad or fresh cut fries, neither of which were a disappointment.

There are a number of other dishes available, including mussels, seafood gumbo, duck confit, grassfed hangar steak, and more mysteriously, the Que Sueno de los Gatos, or, ‘What Cats Dream Of’, a large dish of Pearl Dive Seafood Stew served with Shrimp, Redfish, Squid, and Mussels in a Saffron Milk broth.

There’s not much to dislike here, if at all. The service is outstanding, the seafood is standard setting, and the large open bar that spills out to the sidewalk makes it the perfect place to meet up and have a quick drink or bite on the warmest of District days. If that’s not enough, there’s a separate Prohibition Era dressed bar upstairs called Black Jack, and rumor is that there’s two bocce ball courts on the premises, too.

Being that Jen’s not exactly keen on meats, anyone want to take a visit with me? First drink is on me.

 See Pearl Dive Oyster Palace on a map here. Recommended For:

• Fans of the Mollusk
• Pescetarians
• Paleoheads
• First Dates
• Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa

Not Recommended For:

• Vegetarians
• Mikimoto Mavens
• Frugalistas
• Barnacle Barry