This was the softest of soft openings. But old customers had no trouble sniffing it out. The first one in, Joan Quann, a retired French teacher in straw hat and amber brooch, contentedly ordered her twice-a-week usual, a half dozen oysters on the half shell.
On the feeding plain that is Center City, you have your choice these days of a flood tide of high-end steak houses. Small BYOs, French bistros and burger bars are legion. You may select, as well, from a handful of soulless seafood houses, chains without resonance, the Bookbinder ships having sunk, and the once-bold Striped Bass with them.
What you are harder-pressed to find are 120-seat places on the order of Oyster House, now on its third generation of Minks, harking to the days (its lineage goes back to Kelly's on Mole Street) when corner oyster saloons were as common as pizza stands, offering various fish chowders for lunch, fried oysters (in delicate corn flour, if you wish) with chicken salad, and plain grilled bluefish.
If the loyal regulars could have hugged the joint, they may well have. It has been closed for a year, hidden behind a plywood curtain while it was remodeled. (The Mink family reclaimed it after an interim operator, Cary Neff, ran into financial - and a few food-quality - difficulties.)
Familiar faces were back where they belonged. Fred Finlan pouring beer. Veteran servers serving. The dream team of shuckers (Ameen Lawrence, Cornell Rhoades, and Tyrone Jennings), manning a more-central raw bar, ice piled high, stools lining it on three sides; "the hottest seats in town," Mink the younger assessed objectively.
