New York’s Grand Central Oyster Bar reopens with $40 crab cakes

This famed restaurant survived two global pandemics and now soaring seafood costs. A brief look at its vaunted history.

The interior of the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. Picture: Getty Images

kevin doyle

3 min read

5:00PMDecember 03, 2021

When it opened in 1913, as the main dining room for the city’s new Beaux-Arts transportation hub, what we know today as New York’s Grand Central Oyster Bar was baldly dubbed the Grand Central Terminal Restaurant. Its name was the only prosaic thing about it. Persian carpets covered the floors, cane-backed chairs stood at tables draped in white linen, and a ceiling of vaulted canopies inlaid with sand-hued tiles glistened above electric chandeliers.

Freshly shucked oysters are laid on ice at the Oyster Bar. Picture: Getty Images

Well into the 1960s, deals were sealed in the clubby (and quieter) adjoining Saloon, over lunches of dry martinis and silken oyster pan roasts. But by the early ’70s, rail travel was in rapid decline, and the Oyster Bar along with it. The ceiling tiles were darkened from time and neglect, aqua contact paper covered the marble pillar bases, and plastic fish festooned fishing nets that hung from the ceiling. On the last day of July 1974, the Oyster Bar closed. Later that year, restaurateur Jerome Brody took the helm and the restaurant reopened.

From the looks of it, you’d never guess the Oyster Bar had survived two global pandemics, dodged the wrecking ball and risen from the ashes of an inferno.

It reopened in late September after being closed for almost 18 months of the pandemic.

The burnished wood panelling still casts a welcoming glow, the main counter and its 23 leather stools run along the same wall they did when steel baron Charles M. Schwab sat there, and the tiled ceiling – completely restored in 2014 – sparkles.

The air is cleaner than it was in the days when people smoked between courses, but still perfumed with hints of Worcestershire, chilli sauce and brine. The menu has seen some recent abridgements.

“The cost of products has gone up dramatically because of Covid,” says executive chef Sandy Ingber, who has worked at the Oyster Bar for more than 30 years. Casualties include the lobster roll and fried clams. The combination pan roast remains, along with at least 12 varieties of oysters, fresh fish and crab cakes, which Ingber says are flying off the menu.

“At $US40 ($56) a plate I’m just breaking even, but the crab cakes sell out every day. It’s amazing. People don’t care what they cost. I’m shocked, but I’m happy.”

Jackie Kennedy Onassis attends the Save Grand Central even at the Oyster Bar in 1977. Picture: Getty Images

More to the story

Key events in the oyster bar’s red-and-white checkered history

1913: The new Grand Central Terminal opens and “supplies patrons with home comforts” at a cost of more than $US1bn in today’s dollars. Its main restaurant boasts one of the city’s largest raw bars. Newspapers proclaim it equal to “the most famous restaurants in New York or the capitals of Europe”.

1941: The Oyster Bar is on the cover of The New Yorker, with throngs of ski-toting Manhattanites lined up for a sustaining stew before training it to the slopes.

1974: The Oyster Bar is closed. MTA gives restaurateur Jerome Brody $US75,000 to renovate. He spends almost twice that and reopens two months later with a new menu and an expanded wine list.

1975: Jackie Onassis holds a press conference at the Oyster Bar as part of her campaign to protect Grand Central from development plans that would destroy the main waiting room, part of the main concourse, and perhaps the Oyster Bar itself.

1997: An overnight fire sweeps through the restaurant. Hundreds of the tiles pop out of the ceiling and virtually the entire restaurant is reduced to ash. Two weeks later, a reduced menu is being served in the Saloon; the restaurant reopens (minus many tiles) and the full menu is offered again in less than three months.

2018: Anguished cries issue from the Oyster Bar when the $US14 caviar, egg and sour cream sandwich is removed from the menu due to a shortage of Louisiana bowfin roe. The sandwich returns to the menu the following year and continues to have a devoted following.

2020: The restaurant closes twice: First in March, along with most everything else on the planet due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and again in September, after a brief attempt to reopen fails due to a lack of business.

September 2021: The restaurant reopens.