Be a Local and Order Another Martini
Be a Local and Order Another Martini
Gin at the Grand Central Oyster Bar
I used to live in New York City. After seven years in North Carolina, the city still feels like home, but it’s a different sort of home, one that is also strange. I may think that I live there for a few days or weeks, but then I realize that a particular pizza place has closed, or I have forgotten the stops on a subway line, and I know it isn’t mine, not really.
I get to go back most summers, and now I have rituals for my time there. These rituals aren’t complicated: many involve sitting in parks and watching people. But one involves happy hour in a train station. Some days, after reading at the New York Public Library, I walk down the front steps, past the lions, and two blocks over to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station.
The Oyster Bar is located on the dining concourse, below the main concourse. From about 5:00 to 6:30 in the evening, this lower concourse is packed with commuters clutching their Two Boots pizza slices and Shake Shack burgers. The ceiling is low, so the space feels tucked away from the station above and perhaps less subject to its clocks and schedules, at least if you don’t have to go anywhere.
And Grand Central Station is hectic enough on a weekday evening to make you glad you’re not going anywhere. This is where the Oyster Bar comes in. I try to arrive shortly after five so I can get a good seat. I walk straight through the station, past everyone rushing around under the jade-green zodiac sky, and down to the OYSTER BAR RESTAURANT sign. The restaurant is through these doors to the left, and the cafeteria-style counters are to the right. The lounge is straight ahead, with its white Eero Saarinen tables and chairs. If you walk past the cafeteria counters and into the next room, you’ll find yourself in another bar that is darker and more tavern-like and decorated with paintings of ships.
I sit down at the right-hand corner table in the lounge and order a half dozen oysters and a gin martini with a twist. The last time I was there, this was $20. If the train station smells like the city, the Oyster Bar smells like the sea: salty and fishy.
The happy-hour oysters tend to be big. They’re not delicate, richly flavorful oysters like some other options on the menu, but they’re good oysters. Simple. I haven’t ever asked what kind of gin they use for the happy-hour martinis. It doesn’t draw attention to itself. It’s just gin, but it’s also good. And the martini is served in the kind of glass I like—a smaller glass—with a bit of extra in a small carafe. Some bars, especially hotel bars, prefer huge martini glasses that feel inelegant and all-American super-sized. A smaller glass fits in your hand. It doesn’t try to overwhelm you.
The Oyster Bar may seem like a touristy choice. It’s “iconic,” and this isn’t necessarily a favorable description: it suggests that the life of a place may be in the past and not in the present. It opened in 1913, so it has been a lot of things. And it still is a lot of things. Yes, there are tourists, but there are also commuters and New Yorkers and people like me who aren’t really anything at all, who are insider and outsider, who are just there. Sometimes I watch people check their watches. Maybe they have dinner plans and theater tickets. Maybe they’re waiting to catch a train home to the suburbs. I go to the Oyster Bar because watching people dash off to wherever they’re going makes me feel less like I, eventually, will also have to leave.
And so I drink my martini and eat my oysters and listen to strangers’ voices echo on the white-tiled vaulted ceilings. In fact, the tiles aren’t actually white at all; they just create an effect of white. They’re pale brown and taupe, with grooves along the length of them, like a rake run over sand. When I first realized this, I thought that I knew the place, and I felt good and like I lived in the city, and so I ordered another martini.