Friends,
I’ve been looking for a full time editorial job for over a year now, and it’s been kind of a slog if I’m honest. I get tons of first, second, even third round interviews and then I get the inevitable email: we’ve decided to pull this job and not hire, or we love you, but we love someone else more. I am trying to keep positive, but it’s been a bit challenging of late. Anyway, I realized this week that maybe what I really want is Lars Viola’s job; he’s Director of Oysters and Oyster Sommelier at Crew, the maritime restaurant group founded in 2014 by brothers and lifelong sailors Alex and Miles Pincus. Lars spends his days learning about and serving oysters and teaching his staff everything about these beautiful bivalves to make sure you have the best oyster experience at his raw bar! What’s better than that?
You probably know Crew – the company behind beautiful summertime waterfront spots Grand Banks, Pilot, Island Oyster, Drift In, High Tide, and Holywater? Well, if you’ve been, then you may know Lars. Born in Hampton Bays, he started out shucking oysters at Grand Banks 10 years ago when he was just a wee lad of 26, and has grown up with the company, digging into oyster history and their “merroir,” educating himself and his staff on the beauty and power of the humble oyster – it cleans the ocean! Its reefs bolster the shores against hurricanes and create natural habitats for sea life to grow and thrive!
Now he and his team are preparing to open the company’s tenth and most ambitious project to date, The Yacht Club. It’s everything you want from a three-hour tour without the shipwreck (if you know Gilligan you know): a 20,000 square-foot, two-floor, indoor-outdoor dining destination with sweeping views of Manhattan's West Side waters.
Located on the tenth floor of the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea, the Yacht Club was designed by Crew’s Alex Pincus, a trained architect, with the expertise of Eric Cheong of North 45 Projects and it is breathtaking and highly original in that it has the feel of a luxury schooner. The hub’s interior is high glam – modeled on 19th and 20th century yacht clubs. It’s outfitted with walnut booths, vintage deco lighting, rope-wrapped columns, a Love Boat styled 15,000 square foot Lido Deck, with open air patios, bi-level bars and rentable cabanas, alongside a 125-seat indoor dining room. I want to be shipwrecked here.
The menu is from Chef Andres Grundy (formerly of L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon and Raoul’s) who is working with Crew’s longstanding Culinary Director Kerry Heffernan to do a ship-to-shore menu that includes a full raw bar under Lars’ care (seafood towers galore!), Montauk’s daily catch, a blackened Atlantic Skate Wing meuniere; Tomahawk Steak Frites; and a Lobster Roll à la Minute. There’s an easy breezy menu of sandwiches and salads, snacks and shareable plates ideal for whiling away the hours and watching the sunset.
The beverage program by Restaurant Director/Sommelier Anthony Gochal (formerly of Mercado Little Spain, The Ritz-Carlton NoMad, Jean-Georges’ Tin Building, The Fulton) includes beachy cocktails, cold champagne and a coastal wine list in addition to slushies, frozens, and shareable pitchers of punches ideal for a day at sea.
But the raw bar program is a highlight of every Crew restaurant and at The Yacht Club, even moreso. Expect grand icy towers of pristine shellfish, trays of beautifully shucked briny oysters, luxe caviar service and more. I had the chance to chat with Lars about the oyster program ahead of the opening; we covered the ins and outs of planning a raw bar, Crew’s own breed of oysters grown exclusively for the restaurant group, and the one mistake you should never make while eating an oyster.
The Strong Buzz: How do you go about writing an oyster list for your restaurants?
Lars Viola: I have long relationships with oyster farmers up and down the east and west coasts and I am always looking for small mom and pops farmers to bring on to the menu. We do six oysters at all our restaurants – I don’t want to have too many and overwhelm people. I feel like this number allows me to serve different styles of oysters from different geographic areas. You know oysters taste like the waters they come from – they reflect the “merroir” — so we try to cover a lot of different bases sourcing them from different locations.
Right now we’ve got and Wellfleets from Massachusetts, Mere Points from the Maquiot Bay in Maine, Montauk Pearls from the Napeague Bay out on the East End, Kusshis from Deep Bay in British Columbia, and Wavelengths from Mobjack Bay in Virginia, which is an oyster not many people know of yet. It’s grown by the Matheson Oyster Co., a female-owned and family-operated oyster farm in Gloucester, VA in the Mobjack Bay leading right out to the Chesapeake Bay. There’s some salinity but also some sweetness from the bay. And for the first time this year we are serving our very own oysters — Sailor Baby — grown for us by West Robbin Farm out in Southhampton. I like to encourage guests to order a dozen and taste how different a West Coast is from an East Coast and the difference between one from Virginia is to one from Montauk.
What are some of the differences?
West Coast oysters are more plump with a deeper cup. They tend to be more creamy, not as briny. Then when you move to the East Coast like a classic Montauk Pearl, it’s very close to the ocean with high brine and flatter cup than the West Coast.
Tell me about the Sailor Baby, the first oyster made for Crew.
These oysters are grown for us by West Robbins Farm in South Hampton in the Great Peconic Bay. They save us a portion of cages that are just for Crew restaurants, so you can't get these oysters anywhere else. This summer is the first time they’re ready to be harvested and the first time we are selling our own oysters. I’ve been going out there to visit them and check on them so I can better educate my staff on the way they are raised. They’re named for Alex’s son Sailor.
What’s your day-to-day like as Director of Oysters?
It’s a lot of staff training and making sure everyone interacting with oysters is completely up to date with the flavor profiles, where they come from and understanding more about the history and complex biology of oysters and the way they support our oceans. The goal is to have the most educated staff so we can give our guests exactly what they are asking for.
Should you eat oysters plain or use the mignonette?
If you get a dozen oysters, try the first one without anything on it so you can get the full flavor of the merroir. Then from there you can add toppings. Maybe do one with just lemon, one with mignonette. My only rule is to hold off on the cocktail sauce; that’s best for shrimp and clams. If you use it on oysters, it's like putting ketchup on steak.
Is there a right way to eat an oyster?
With a properly shucked oyster, the muscles should be completely separated from the shell and you should be able to just use your oyster fork to wiggle it loose so it slips out of the shell with its liquor. Don’t put the shell in your mouth – just tip it back and let it slip into your mouth. A mistake I often see is people using the oyster fork to pluck it out of its shell and eat it off of the fork. When you do that you miss out on the liquor that’s in there and that’s so much a part of the oyster’s flavor. Also, do not just swallow it! The most important part is to chew it! If you don’t chew it you will miss out on texture and flavor. Oysters have three tasting areas – the brine, textural notes from the body, and the after taste of butter, cream, cucumber or melon. These flavors come only after you have chewed your oyster!
Anything else we should know about your oyster program?
Yes, we are part of the shell recycling program run by the Billion Oyster Project. All our oyster shells go back to BOP which uses them to form new oyster reefs and repopulate the harbor with oysters which clean the water and bring back more aquatic species that were once here that are gone because of pollution. We donated 60K pounds in shells last summer. We were the second biggest contributor in NY.
Want more about Lars? Watch this this video where Lars talks about what makes a great oyster, the restaurant's Sailor Baby, and the importance of the Billion Oyster Project.
The Yacht Club opens Thursday at 212 12th Avenue, 10th Floor; Reserve here.
Ahoy!
Exciting new restaurant! Great interview!
What a great gig, and I am so glad that the title oyster sommelier has caught on as opposed to the unwieldy mermellier!