Strange Delight Channels New Orleans in All the Right Ways

El-Waylly mans the pass in Strange Delight’s slip of a kitchen. A chef and recipe developer, he has lately become a serious culinary social-media star alongside his wife, Sohla (who is not connected to the restaurant), and his charisma turns out to be considerable in real life, too. (The first time I met him, he was wearing Birkenstock clogs in a striking Yves Klein blue; I immediately bought an identical pair.) Pillarisetti, a veteran of Momofuku and Shake Shack, can often be spotted keeping an eye on the dining room; the two are partners with Michael Tuiach, of the vegan fast-food mini-chain Moonburger. Smartly, the menu’s culinary homages are more riffs than facsimiles. Galatoire’s oysters Rockefeller, broiled with the expected spinach and dash of Herbsaint, are deepened with a hint of dill and a slinky, stinky wisp of anchovy. Casamento’s fried-seafood sandwiches, piled high with pickles and Duke’s mayo and shredded iceberg, are served not on the traditional Texas toast but between slices of chewy-soft and faintly sweet Japanese milk bread. Rich, creamy dips—a cold one made of smoked fish, a hot one made with fresh crab and a hit of Pernod—come with a brown-paper bag of buttery fried Saltines that have an unexpected red-pepper kick.

Strange Delight bills itself as an oyster bar (for a time, the restaurant’s Web site was oysterdisco.com), though just one variety of the bivalve at a time appears on the menu, in two sizes: big ones, for frying and broiling, and small ones, for serving raw, with a brisk mignonette dolled up with lashings of Peychaud’s. There are a handful of vegetarian dishes—hush puppies, bronzed and crumbly, served with a dollop of butter whipped with Steen’s cane syrup; a crunchy slaw of Chinese broccoli in a creamy vegan dressing that’s reminiscent of Superiority Burger, in the best way; “mushroom à la escargot,” a gorgeous puddle of garlic butter with plump cremini mushrooms. But the menu is, overwhelmingly, dedicated to the fruits of the sea. In fact, as far as I can tell, no nonaquatic creatures make appearances at all. There’s still plenty to choose from, and it’s hard to go wrong, though if you need to narrow things down I’d say you can skip the marinated crab claws, which are visually striking but fairly bland, and the striped bass amandine, which can’t compete with a revelatory blackened swordfish belly that’s so buttery and rich it’s nearly liquid. In the course of several visits, I found myself returning to a few standouts: the Felix’s-inspired oysters, broiled under a comforting, black-peppery blanket of parmesan and garlic, and a BBQ shrimp “derivative of Pascal’s Manale,” the New Orleans restaurant said to have invented the dish. At Strange Delight, it features four enormous crustaceans peering out of a dark and velvety concoction made from beer, butter, and spices. The shrimp were delicious, head and all, but the sauce was so magnificent—complex, savory, sweet, sultry—that I was tempted to lift the bowl and slurp it down like soup.

A meal at Strange Delight can feel refined or rowdy, depending on where you sit. The front room, with counter seats outlining the oyster bar and high-top tables along the walls, has a mood of communal vivacity—the ring of cross-table conversation, the banter of hustling cooks and shuckers, the non-stop movement of servers wiggling through the narrow spaces between tables. All of it is amplified by the shiny, acoustic-enhancing tiled walls, but it’s a cacophony that feels energizing rather than overwhelming. Through a narrow passage, past a glass-walled wine-storage area containing an impressive selection of natural bottles, lies a high-ceilinged back dining room anchored by an enormous wood-and-marble bar. This room, too, feels like a version of New Orleans—more modern, a little sleeker, less burdened by the weight of history and tradition. In this room, lingering over Le Grande Remoulade (a heaping portion of chilled shrimp and crab, sweet and briny, tossed in a creamy sauce tinged pink with spices, alongside an array of crudités and a satin-yolked boiled egg) feels leisurely rather than boisterous. Toward the end of dinner in the back room one evening, having giddily over-ordered and reached a physical inability to carry on eating, I nevertheless found myself taking bite after bite of the little portion of bread pudding that all diners receive as a complimentary dessert, prolonging the meal, delaying my departure, simply because being there felt so good. ♦

An earlier version of this article inaccurately described a dish pictured in a photograph.