The Freshest Oysters on the Jersey Shore

Anyone who’s been confused by New Jersey’s Garden State nickname hasn’t ventured into the state’s rural south, a swath of mystical cranberry bogs, sun-dappled blueberry groves and farms founded by seed-smuggling southern Italian immigrants in the early 1900s. Routes 55 and 47, known to beach-bound Philadelphians as the “back way” to the shore, scythes right through the cornfields and pepper patches of Cumberland County. In only a few years, Sweet Amalia Market and Kitchen, farmer Lisa Calvo’s low-slung marigold shed serving rigorously sourced, wildly delicious food April through November, has become a detour as essential as Wawa.

Calvo doesn’t grow fruits or vegetables, but rather refreshing, white-shelled oysters under the name Sweet Amalia, raised in what she describes as “a big, shallow mixing bowl of salty water from the Atlantic and fresh water from the Delaware River,” 40 miles south of the market by the wetlands-fringed terminus of 47 in Cape May County. “There’s tremendous maritime culture in this bayshore, with one of the world’s largest productions of crabs and oysters at the turn of the 19th century,” says Calvo. Her restaurant perfectly encapsulates the region’s culinary heritage—terrestrial and marine, ​​with a pepperoncini dash of Italian American swagger—though that was not entirely by design.

Prior to 2021, if you wanted to try Sweet Amalia oysters, you had to visit one of Calvo’s Philly restaurant clients. But as the pandemic dried up orders, she had to find another outlet. The owner of her packing house, an old farmstand in Newfield, had the place up for sale: “Please take this shack.” Meanwhile, Melissa McGrath, an award-winning chef working in San Francisco, was moving back to Philly and reached out to Calvo to volunteer at the oyster farm. In a few months, Calvo, her partner, Ed Pappas and McGrath were in the restaurant business. “It’s still pretty much a shack,” she says. “Just a very cute one.”

McGrath follows the Jersey agricultural calendar, stocking peas with mussels in May, spooning simmered strawberries over cream-topped biscuits in June, assembling thick slabs of tomato into epic BLTs in July. September is the region’s showiest month, with obstinate heat-keeping peppers, peaches, eggplant, and corn in play, while the earliest pears, apples and winter squash begin to appear on the farmstand’s beautifully arranged shelves and on McGrath’s menu.

Join the line at the counter and order the veggie-stuffed hoagie, the meatball sub, made with grass-fed beef and pork from Sickler Circleview Farm, or the unctuous Philly-style roast pork sandwich. Oysters come shucked and iced with lemon and mignonette, fried and tucked into oyster rolls with tangy slaw, and baked in crimson pools of harissa-lime butter. (If you’ve got a Yeti in the trunk, fetch an oyster pie or quart of oyster stew from the retail freezer.) 

Diners gather under a tangerine umbrella, or out by the pumpkins and mums. On weekends, the vibe is family picnic. Parents with sandy-toed kids on their way back from the beach. The city’s food cognoscenti uncorking lean Gruners. Farmers whose families have worked this land for generations pulling up in their F150s. Calvo only ever wanted a place to sell her oysters. “I had never dreamed of having a restaurant.” She wound up with a physical and spiritual nexus of South Jersey as well.