Oyster Boy – 4 stars

This is an awesome restaurant! it’s a small tiny place on Queen St West near Shaw, across from the Candy Lofts. Here’s an exact map of it.

I personally think that Toronto needs more of these intimate, cozy, and hidden away gems. In contrast to the over-designed, soon-to-be tacky looking places popping up all over the GTA, this place wins you over with it’s understated (not to be confused with minimalistic) bar-cross-resto charm.

The food on the other hand, is definitely on the high end -and not in price, but in quality. So even though oysters are the speciality, they have plenty of other choices too (obviously mostly seafood though). I went with the sea bream as my main which I think may have been one of the best fish dishes I’ve had – proof that there is actually a skilled kitchen crew and not just a bunch of oyster harvesters . But if you’re a shucking kinda person, i’d go for the raw oysters – with a choice of toppings including banana pepper paste, a homemade garlic-ginger-chilli sauce, or even vodka infused with chilli peppers. You can down a plateful without even realizing it. but by far, my favourite were the baked oysters – go for the rockfort cheese ones – I had never heard of baked oysters or of the deep fried oysters which as JM says – ‘everything tastes good fried’. We got a sampling plate so unfortunately we didn’t get to try the jerk or curry flavoured ones – not sure how high they rank on the aphrodesiac scale, but i’ll be trying them the next time i’m there!

oh and don’t forget to try the fries with jalapeno mayo – it’ll convert every one of you ketchup freaks…

Official Oyster Boy site