There is a chalkboard propped on a piece of driftwood at the oyster bar, and it says POBOY SPECIAL with an exclamation point. That is the whole announcement. Salted Pearl Oyster Bar is making po-boys.
Two of them. Fried shrimp for $16, fried oyster for $18. Both come dressed the way a po-boy is supposed to come dressed, lettuce and tomato and pickle. Then Chef David "Tyger" Hale adds the part that is his.
Remoulade is not the standard po-boy move. The standard is mayonnaise, and there is nothing wrong with mayonnaise. But Tyger makes his remoulade in house, and Creole remoulade is a different animal: mustard-forward, tangy, a little heat behind it. It comes to the plate the color of gold. On a fried oyster, where you have got soft brine sitting inside a crisp crust, that tang gives the bite somewhere to go.
The oysters were already here, which is the other reason this makes sense. Salted Pearl pulls its oysters from a fourth-generation farm in St. Bernard Parish, about thirty minutes down the road, and they come in fresh daily. Tyger has been serving them raw, charbroiled, and Rockefeller. Frying them and laying them on French bread is not a stretch. Same oyster, one step further.
If you have not met Tyger, he spent close to ten years as a professional horse jockey and rode more than 1,100 races on Louisiana tracks before an injury ended that career. He has been an executive chef for 24 years since. He cooked his grandmother's shrimp courtbouillon on FOX 8 earlier this year and said that every dish has a story.
The po-boy's story turns out to be a neighbor. Bennie and Clovis Martin invented the sandwich in 1929 at their coffee stand in the French Market, feeding striking streetcar workers for free through the walkout that started that July. "Here comes another poor boy," one of them would say when a striker turned up. Within a couple of years the brothers moved into a bigger room on St. Claude Avenue at Touro Street, and Martin Brothers' stayed on that corner into the 1970s with a sign out front calling them the originators.
Same avenue we are sitting on. So the sandwich is coming home to a street it already knows, and it does not need reinventing. Tyger did not reinvent it. He just made the sauce himself.
Come get one at the oyster bar in the middle of the market, 2381 St. Claude Ave. Weekdays between 3 and 5, the oysters are a dollar.