Titillation Score: Extreme Titillation

Grab one from the bucket. Gaze straight into its googlie eyes. Clutch its rear and pull forcefully yet with ginger dexterity. Squeeze a little lemon and dip the derriere into the butter sauce and suck it right out of the shell. While this may seem like one of our naughty fantasies, it’s actually the true Creole custom of eating crawfish.

The Broadway Oyster Bar in downtown St. Louis offers this and other fresh seafood flown in daily from the Gulf Coast. The kitchen specializes in Cajun cuisine serving Creole dishes like oysters on the half-shell, jambalaya, crawfish and fried alligator.

Eugene hollers oyster orders that resonate through the small window separating the cooking quarters from the dining quarters. The whole place feels like a bayou boat shack: complete with the fresh catch of the day mounted on the wall. For all of you taxidermy fans out there, Broadway Oyster Bar has no shortage of huge stuffed fish. Also adorning the walls are a vintage portrait of Sacagawea, Louisiana banners and road signs and hundreds of napkins stapled to the wood paneling.

Vintage vinyls from legends such as Ella Fitzgerald, The Beach Boys, The Temptations, Isaac Hayes, Frank Sinatra and B.B. King blanket the ceiling. The music that plays throughout the restaurant rivals those records. The restaurant features live bands nightly.

The napkins decorating the walls are the second most interesting decorations. They showcase attempts at artistic doodling, confessions of lost love and casual notes to friends. All diners are welcome to add their personal flavor to the d‚cor of the Broadway Oyster Bar, which is referred to by its regulars as BOB.

The menu offers a few non sea-food selections; however, it’s best to come in the mood for seafood that appears capable of creeping off your plate while you bite off its brother’s tail.

The only things that we ordered that seemed strictly routine were beer and chicken wings. However, the chicken wings were called voodoo wings, which immediately caught our attention. The pound of chicken wings comes covered in Eugene’s Cajun Tequila hot sauce, which added a Creole twist to the traditional American appetizer.

The Broadway Oyster Bar obviously prides itself on its oyster specialties. Their oysters are prepared fresh in a variety of different ways; both traditional (on the half shell, Rockefeller, and fried) and experimental. A local favorite are the Oyster Shooters. You get six fresh-shucked oysters with a horseradish, tomato and vodka mixture served in individual shot glasses. Interestingly enough, our waitress Mindy works at an oyster bar and has yet to try them, but you’d be pretty crazy not to.

The fried alligator tail is perhaps the shadiest character to appear on the menu. We expected it to taste either like puppy or chicken, but to the trained taste bud, it tasted a lot like crocodile. Over a quarter pound of juicy alligator tail meat is marinated for tenderness and then battered with buttermilk and cornflakes and flash fried. It is surprisingly mouth-watering and will leave you wanting more.

Spicy Louisiana crawfish and grinder sandwiches round out the Bayou classics on the menu and the Louisiana Mud Pie is reason enough to come back to the Broadway Oyster Bar. The Mud Pie is a frozen ice cream concoction with several liqueurs and a cookie crust, topped with brandied chocolate sauce and pecans.

The Broadway Oyster Bar (314-621-8811) was voted Best Cajun/Creole Restaurant in the 2004 Reader’s Choice awards on saucemagazine.com and we liked it a lot, too. It is located at 736 S. Broadway right near Busch Stadium.

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