He was a very valiant man who first adventured on eating of oysters.
-Thomas Fuller, 1662
OYSTER PLATTERS ARE TYPICALLY an exercise in comparing flavors from different bodies of water. Sometimes they’re just an exercise in eating a bunch of them, because they’re oysters and that’s reason enough. But rarely do you encounter one of these round, ice-packed metal pans whose occupants could actually be classified as four distinct types of oyster. Imagine, the smallest is petite as a bottle cap; the largest could fill your entire mouth. Each arrived on this platter through a combination of history and happenstance, obsessive farmers, good old-fashioned capitalism, and a local food culture that’s grown to like its oysters raw and straight from the shell.
SHUCK OYSTER BAR AT THE MIX SOCO
3313 HYLAND #1, COSTA MESA, CA 92626
(949) 420-1478