Oyster House Restaurant

Let's get one thing out of way first, stone crab is really pricey.  Now then, while looking for somewhere we could go to find apalachicola oysters and stone crab, my wife came upon an article that mentioned the Oyster House in Everglades City, which Yelp calls Everglades for reasons unknown.  We figured, what the heck let's give it a try, after all most of the stone crab harvested in the world comes from Everglades City.  An hour later we cruised into the parking lot.  Everglades City is really isolated but very intriguing historically.  This lone lit building on an otherwise unremarkable rural residential street holds a true food find.  The building is in a traditional Florida style and the walls are plastered with vintage pictures and stuffed heads of animals who were unfortunate enough to be hunted.  Unlike Cracker Barrel, where this vintage look is manufactured hokum, Oyster House is not part of a chain and the stuff is real.  The staff was friendly and helpful and service was fast enough to fend off boredom and slow enough to permit casual conversation and a well paced meal.  But all that is just a prelude to the headline event, dinner.

We started with the aforementioned apalachicola oysters.  They were perfectly brined and very fresh.  What a treat!  She-crab soup was a little under seasoned but still extremely tasty.  The stone crab was stunningly sweet and perfectly cooked and cooled.  Their mustard sauce is a perfect accompaniment and the melted butter, well, is melted butter.  Each serving was 6 absolutely perfect claws, well cracked so we didn't need to use our crackers.  The fries and sweet potato patties were of equal quality, and the vegetable, a squash medley, was fresh and cooked to just the right level of tenderness.  The fried Gulf shrimp were audibly crispy and not even a little bit greasy.  The hush puppies made us rethink everything we know about hush puppies.  The Grouper Oyster House Style was impeccably seasoned and avoided the all too common tendency to over season this traditional Florida west coast fish.  For dessert, we had the famous Key Lime pie from Randy's, which they offer here.  Most items called key lime pie are really just regular limes with some green food coloring.  Randy's Key Lime pie is the real deal, white, the color of real key lime juice, and made from limes grown in the Florida Keys.  Don't take my word for it, try it yourself.  The taste is unmistakable and nothing like the usual pretenders and wannabes.

The Oyster House Restaurant is far from everywhere, but well worth the cost and the trip.

A little pricy, but the stone crab was delicious.  We also had the key lime tart -- omg, it was sooooo good.    I heard the sauteed alligator was good, but we will have to go back for that.  They also have a huge "stuffed" alligator in the bar area next door, it was fun to take pictures with :-)

As tourists in the Everglades, we just spied this place off the road and since it was getting dark fast we decided to stop in to eat.  It took some time to get seated, but I'm sure that was because there was this massive party taking place there that night.

Service was ok, I felt that we were a little ignored, perhaps again because of the giant party.  In my group, we opted to try all the fried seafood that they had to offer and ordered the seafood basket, fried scallops, and the Captain's platter.

My mistake was ordering the Captain's platter because it was way too much food for me to handle.  I would have been fine with the seafood basket and gotten close to the same variety of seafood.  The only major difference was the Captain's platter cost about $10 more, bigger portions, and came with a crab cake (which was pretty good).  Overall the seafood was fresh and very tasty.  A little disappointed in the oysters that came with the platter.  There were so small and dinky.  My favorite in the platter was probably the fish.  Everything was perfectly fried though and plenty of fries to go around.

Overall, a good place to stop by after taking the boat tours that explore the Everglades.