Back in May, my husband participated in a team building exercise at Island Creek Oyster Farm, out in Duxbury Bay with some colleagues. He approached it with mixed feelings: while a change of pace is always enjoyable he was busy with work and travel, and oysters were not at the top of his priority list. Imagine my surprise that day when I started receiving texts and photos showing oysters at each stage of their growth.
“Look at these toddler oysters!”
“There are teenagers growing out here in these beds”
OK. Who knew it would be such a fun and interesting day?
He came home full of information, enthusiasm and naturally, oysters. The team ended the day with a cooking class and dinner at the Island Creek Oyster Bar in Kenmore Square, a restaurant opened in partnership with the Farm to highlight the magnificent locally harvested oysters. Proud of his newly acquired ability to shuck oysters and excited about the taste and quality of the dinner, including the legendary buttermilk biscuits, he vowed to take me to dinner there soon.
Getting reservations at the ICOB is no easy feat, as word has spread about this great place. The location right at Kenmore Square near Fenway Park gives baseball fans a perfect way to mix sports with culinary decadence during the long Red Sox season. Luckily for us we were able to book a table for our 29th anniversary a couple of weekends ago, after extracting a promise from my husband that he would not pick up a shucking knife and join in once we got there.
The restaurant is airy, open and beautiful, with one whole wall made up of cages full of oyster shells, illuminated from below. The star ingredient is evident everywhere and a long bar full of a huge variety of oysters on ice is manned by many shuckers.
We had our own Mad Men moment, pairing a martini with a huge platter of Island Creek oysters from Duxbury, perhaps the very ones my husband had met as young adults in the bay. The menu detailed a multitude of choices of local shellfish and where they are all grown, including lobster caught by the chef’s cousin Mark in Maine. This is a very personal experience!
The shellfish is complemented by many appetizing choices: cooked appetizers, salads, several fish entrees and even some great sounding meat and chicken dishes, along with a full selection of sides to share. The night we were there the salmon tartare with a touch of sesame oil, which we ordered after seeing it arrive at a neighboring table, was delectable. 
We both enjoyed the monkfish and bluefish entrees, and the famous buttermilk biscuit was so perfectly light, crispy, flakey and ever so slightly sweet that we didn’t even need dessert.
The beautifully designed space offered something many restaurants can’t seem to pull off: decent acoustics. Despite the size of the open area we could hear each other relatively easily and actually carry on a conversation while enjoying the great oldies soundtrack playing in the background. While we savored every bite and reminisced about 29 years together, we kept noticing a charming mother-daughter pair sitting next to us. The young mom and her 10 year old daughter worked their way through oysters, salmon tartar, clam chowder and lobster rolls with admirable gusto. We struck up a conversation with them, remarking on the daughter’s sophisticated palate, and learned she was about to go off to camp in Maine where she would be eating sloppy joe’s for a month. This was her farewell dinner. Hailing from San Francisco, a city we would love to live in again some day, this was a yearly tradition for them. They in turn enjoyed a moment’s conversation with their neighbors on their other side. Certainly you don’t need to meet and greet the other diners if you aren’t in the mood, but there was something so open, friendly and personal about the atmosphere, something almost celebratory as if everyone was there for a special event, that we left feeling like we had dined with good friends.
We are eager to go back again – my husband is still hoping to get a few oysters to shuck himself.
For more information, here is a link to the Farm, the Island Creek Oyster Bar, and an article about both in Boston magazine.
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