The Oyster Bar, Adelaide

The start of summer often means the start of great summer food to come. For example, stone fruits and strawberries are usually widely available in summer rather than autumn/winter. Another example is oysters and crabs. Although oysters are available all-year round, frozen or fresh, but I usually like to eat it when it's in season, mainly because it is fresher, bigger and usually cheaper. :)

I paid a visit to the Oyster bar in Adelaide East, mid-November because I was hankering after au natural oysters and Adelaide East was much nearer than Glenelg. Since I've tried the Glenelg branch once during my 1st/2nd year, I decided to give the Adelaide East branch a go. :)

For those who are planning to pay this bar a visit, be sure to head down on a Tuesday as the oysters are much cheaper then! The day that I and another friend went down, was fortunately a Tuesday, so we had the chance to order and try out more oysters. :P We ordered one dozen of Oysters Natural and one dozen of Oysters Mixed.

Oysters Natural, with 2 wedges of lemon and 1 triangular slice of bread.

I love, love, love the oysters from this place! It's fresh, firm and succulent. Absolutely divine! The only gripe about it is the size. Why is it so small!? :(

Oysters Mixed: Darleyfella, Kilpatrick, Natural and Chilli & Cheese (Clockwise from Top)

This plate was not all-good though, it had hits and misses. The hits were the Chilli & Cheese (my favourite!), Darleyfella (Spinach & Mornay) was not too bad but it had a strong tuna mornay taste and Natural was awesome (as usual). Haha. The miss was the Kilpatrick (bacon with special sauce), it tasted queer, I'm not too sure if the special sauce was meant to taste as such but it was just bad. And very salty, bacon itself is already salty, plus the sauce = too salty! :( Again, the sizes of the oysters are pretty small. But I think having the extra ingredients helped to make it seem more worth it?

Summary

I would highly recommend oyster lovers to go for the Natural oysters and Chilli & Cheese oysters. Stay away from the other two, unless you like having tuna flavoured oysters. I heard that the Pesto oysters are quite good too, but it wasn't included in the mixed platter, so we didn't order that to try. The total damage done to our wallets that day was AUD$39. Not too bad for the quality of the oysters (mainly the Natural and Chilli & Cheese), but I wouldn't go back again because the sizes of the oysters are too small to justify the price. 

Food: 3.5 / 5
Service: 3 / 5 (Service was pretty slow as there was only one staff working and oysters were shucked to order, so it would have been better if there were at least two staff present.)
Value: 2 / 5 (It would have been better if oysters were much bigger, $16 for a dozen small oysters, is indeed quite steep a price.)
Ambience: 3.5 / 5

Adelaide Oyster Bar
14 East Tce, Adelaide, SA 5000
(08) 8232 5422