Yesterday I ran an interview with Daniel Notkin, oyster marketer and conservationist from Montreal, whom I met at Shaw’s Oysterfest last week. Today, from the other end of North America’s oyster habitats, I speak with Tommy Cvitanovich, who runs Drago’s Seafood, a New Orleans restaurant with three locations (the original is in Metairie; there’s also one in the Central Business District and one in Jackson, Mississippi). Drago’s, named for Cvitanovich’s father who started it in 1969, is most famous for a dish Tommy himself invented in 1993: the charbroiled oyster. Grilled oysters are a common (and wonderful) thing in New Orleans—I recommend them highly at Felix’s in the French Quarter—but Tommy had the idea of basically putting on them what an Italian restaurant would put onto garlic bread. The combination of smoke, parmesan and romano cheese, butter, garlic, and herbs, all on an oyster poached in its own briny liquor, does pretty much live up to the restaurant’s promise that it’s “the best single bite of food in New Orleans.” The dish put a fading family business on the New Orleans culinary map and led Cvitanovich to becoming one of the city’s most prominent restaurateurs; he currently serves on the board of the National Restaurant Association.
We brought in a manager who helped us organize the restaurant, and we started selling lobsters as a loss leader for $9.95, with a salad and potato. That took off, and then we started selling charbroiled oysters, and today we have the highest-grossing restaurant in the state of Louisiana, which says a lot when you consider that we’re in New Orleans, which is all about food, which is famous for restaurants—Antoine’s, Galatoire’s, K-Paul’s, all these restaurants. We’re very proud of what our family has accomplished.
I think in Chicago though, people overwhelmingly prefer oysters being served raw, as untampered-with as possible—
Most of our oysters come from within an hour of our restaurant, by truck. Sometimes we have to go to the west coast of Louisiana, but that’s rare. Most of them come from St. Bernard, Plaquemines Parish—the toe of the boot of Louisiana.
We were closed for about six weeks. We were one of the first to open after Katrina. After Katrina our family gave away 80,000 meals at our restaurant and at another spot in Lakeview. We did that for eight weeks, we had a lot of help from our vendors. The guy who invented the turducken gave us a bunch of his frozen meat, instead of throwing it away he got it to me, I got it to Sysco because they had their freezers running on generators, so we had a lot of that meat and cooked it and served it to people.
