Old Town Petersburg restaurant, Oyster Society, offers playful décor, ambitious drinks, and plenty of oysters.
“I got ranch dressing on this menu as a middle finger to those pretentious chefs who turn their noses up to something that tastes good because everybody started dipping their pizza in it. It was once the new thing. It’s an herbaceous, buttermilk … look, it’s been distilled into a sauce that you can get at a gas station, but it doesn’t taste bad.”
“Well, some of them taste bad.”
“They do, but everything can be bad. You can get hollandaise in a bag, but you’ll never see a high-end French bistro that doesn’t put hollandaise on something. And I think with our aesthetic, we can lean into some of those clichés in a fun way.”
I can listen to restaurant industry shop talk for hours. I enjoy the materiality of the industry, the mixture of toil and inspiration. To hang out with Chef Ernie LeBrecque and Bar Director Eli Dwyer is to drift along a free-associative slipstream of food and drink craft, when even something like the presence of ranch dressing can provoke commentary with sociopolitical implications.
LeBrecque and Dwyer are co-owners of the new Old Towne Petersburg restaurant, Oyster Society, slated to open this weekend, along with LeBrecque’s wife and partner Kathryn Bye LeBrecque and investor Elliott Fausz. They are also veterans of the turf, and with Oyster Society they are taking their first big swing at executing their own vision, which might be called fine-dining with the piss taken out of it – fine dining with a sense of humor and community.
Situated on 309 N. Sycamore St., where DJ’s Rajun Cajun used to be, and across the street from the LeBrecques’ delicious hot dog and donut joint, Beaunuts, Oyster Society has a look. Think your fevered imaginings of the Victorian era, executed with tongue-in-cheek obsessiveness. Think art objects and curiosities and bursts of beautiful and lurid color. Think a gothic walk amongst the history of the city, especially the antique furniture stores that lend Old Towne its lustrous, well, tactility—that word again. I walk into the bar with the chaise lounges and bearskin rug and skulls and sketches and wonder if I’m meeting Captain Nemo or the Invisible Man for a drink.
If I still drank, I would be more than tempted by Dwyer’s concoctions. For instance, the Rum Ham is duck fat-washed Appleton Estate rum with mescal, cantaloupe cordial, lemon, and a prosciutto straw. Dwyer also intends to utilize for certain drinks an “Ancho chili, pineapple egg white meringue” that he charges with Co2 in an isi. The result is smooth foam, he says, “with dry curacao added to booze up the sweet and spicy notes.”
For simpler cravings, Dwyer has variations of Richmond’s favorite boilermaker: PBR and whisky. The Black-Toothed Grin is a PBR and a shot of Evans Williams Bottled-in-Bond. The Gold-Toothed Grin, meanwhile, is a PBR and a shot of Talisker Single Malt Scotch, with two oysters on the half shell on the side. Single malts may change seasonally.
Prosciutto and rum and mescal and cantaloupe suggest refinement and bone-sticking, lizard brain-satiating satisfaction. The décor—esoteric yet playful and comfortable—and the food and drink—ambitious, nuanced, yet hearty and primordial—embody the restaurant’s allergy to pretension, which Dwyer and LeBrecque were up front about when we spoke. Fine dining can be fun and boisterous and communal and soul expanding; it needn’t be an act of sanctimonious contrition.
“You might feel intimidated by a gold-rimmed table cloth and assume that’s not your scene,” LeBrecque says. “But I think what we’ve done here draws people in, and we offer oysters as our backbone, which is a wide-ranging dish from peasant to aristocrat.”
More about those oysters: They will be sourced from small-batched farms and will always be available roasted, fried, and on the half-shell. There will always be seasonally shifting variations of oyster stew on a pan-to-order basis, with the first batch pivoting on a corn ale cream and seasonal vegetables.
Given the salty, fatty, anonymous canned slush to which I’ve resorted more than I care to admit—from the grocery store and restaurants alike— this fresh soup, with fresh crackers, is perhaps the most exciting thing that I hear while talking with Dwyer and LeBrecque. It bears repeating: The idea with Oyster Society is to serve real, affirming food and drink, with cheeky décor and bits of theater to subtly coax your inhibitions down and perhaps expand your palette. One bottle of champagne arrives in a Victorian toilet seat, rigged with Castors and an ice bucket.
Or take their butter candle. “Our butter candle is a compound butter with sage, rosemary, dried rose petals, salt, and honey,” LeBrecque says. “You’ll be smelling the dried flower, smelling it while it’s burning down, and at about the time you’re asking, ‘What’s the deal with this candle’ they’ll be walking out with a squid ink buttermilk biscuit as your house bread. By then your butter has melted and you can use it for your bread. It’s an experiential thing, but it’s still Southern bread. Yet it’s black—it’s weird. I did that as a part of play once on biscuits and gravy at Upper Shirley for a wine dinner.”
Oysters are the backbone, while small plates and four entrees, the latter unlisted on the menu and recited by the servers, offer opportunity for experimentation. One of the entrees will be vegan and will be taken as seriously as the other dishes. Or, per LeBrecque, the vegan dish will not be “the rice or the pasta minus all the good shit.” Meanwhile, the small plates encourage the possibilities of popping into the bar spontaneously for a bit of food and a craft cocktail, without the ceremonial rigmarole of a date or watershed moment. Other pop-in options include the patio, where biohazard military coffins will be repurposed into coolers for drinks and oysters, and where live music will eventually be hosted.
But I keep returning to those oysters and that seasonal stew. A hot bowl on an Autumn evening sounds like home and hearth epitomized. Thankfully, I live nearby.
Slated to open this coming weekend, Oyster Society is located on 309 N. Sycamore St., Petersburg, Va. Check Oyster Society on Facebook for more details.