What do you actually eat at a place called an oyster bar when you don’t particularly like oysters? This is a reasonable question to ask before walking into The Publican Oyster Bar on West Fulton Market, and the answer turns out to be: almost everything else on the menu, and you will be very glad you came.
The restaurant sits on a strip of Fulton Market that has become one of the more concentrated blocks of serious eating in Chicago. It opened as a spinoff of the original Publican — the big, loud, communal beer hall around the corner on North Ogden — but The Oyster Bar operates on a tighter, more personal scale. The room is narrow and warm, anchored by a curved marble bar where you can watch the kitchen work without being directly in anyone’s way. It seats maybe forty people. Reservations go fast, and walk-ins are possible early or late, but not really in between.
The menu is built around shellfish and charcuterie, with enough supporting cast that non-oyster people have real options. The house-cured meats come out on a wooden board with good mustard and a little pot of something acidic — pickled something, usually, that changes by season. The country pâté, when they have it, is dense and properly funky. If you’re sharing, order that and let it sit while you work through bread.
The oysters themselves — if you do go that route — come from both coasts and change based on what’s available. The staff knows where each one is from and can tell you the difference between a coppery Wellfleet and a mild, buttery Gulf variety without making you feel like you’re being lectured. A half-dozen will run you somewhere between sixteen and twenty-two dollars depending on the selection. Order the mignonette; skip the cocktail sauce.
What holds the whole thing together is the wine list and the beer list, both of which reflect genuine thought. The original Publican built its identity partly around Belgian and farmhouse ales, and that DNA is still here — you’ll find saisons and lambics alongside a compact but well-chosen bottle list that leans toward natural and low-intervention producers. A glass in the ten-to-fifteen-dollar range is easy to find; nothing is wasted space.
The service tone is knowledgeable without being stiff. The people working the bar seem to actually like being there, which is not something you can say about every room in this neighborhood, where polish sometimes substitutes for warmth. At The Oyster Bar, those two things coexist without obvious effort.
Fulton Market in general has become expensive and a little self-conscious, and there are restaurants on this same block that feel more interested in being photographed than in feeding you. The Oyster Bar doesn’t feel that way. It’s small enough that the kitchen is accountable for every plate, and the menu is focused enough that there’s nothing on it that shouldn’t be there.
Go on a weeknight if you can. Sit at the bar if there’s space. Plan to spend around sixty to eighty dollars a person with drinks, which is on the higher end of what Chicago asks but reasonable for what you get. If you’ve walked out of a meal on Fulton Market feeling vaguely cheated before — and plenty of people have — this is the correction.
