A raw bar is a small restaurant or a bar within a restaurant where live raw shellfish are shucked and served. These restaurants are traditionally popular in coastal resort areas, and increasingly with the advent of fast shipment of seafood, in major cities away from the coast.
Raw bars serve a selection of oysters and quahogs, and sometimes supplement the menu with cooked versions of the same seafoods such as clam chowder, oyster stew, and steamers. Condiments, such as cocktail sauce, may be available for consumers.
Though there is some similarity to a sushi bar, the two types of restaurant are considered different and are not generally mixed or confused. Sometimes raw liver is served as well.
Famous quotes containing the words raw and/or bar:
“I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in New England but the weather. I don’t know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk’s factory who experiment and learn how.... In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four-and-twenty hours.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The bar is the male kingdom. For centuries it was the bastion of male privilege, the gathering place for men away from their women, a place where men could go to freely indulge in The Bull Session ... the release of the guilty anxiety of the oppressor class.”
—Shulamith Firestone (b. 1945)