The catch of the day, pompano of late, was delicious in an olive tapenade with preserved lemon and yet more greens. Its grass-fed rib eye was just as excellent, served with a silky puree of potatoes and a hodgepodge of mushrooms - frilly oyster mushrooms, slender-stemmed enoki - with sautéed rapini as a lusciously bitter sidekick. Its linguine with clams was half noodles, half briny, shell-on littlenecks brightened by lemon and the background heat of chilies. Traditional stuffies (huge quahog clam shells stuffed with smoky bacon and buttery breadcrumbs) impressed, as did a simple order of calamari speckled with hot peppers.īut it was Izzy’s non-New England dishes that most struck me. Whole-belly Ipswich clams, all juicy and chew-ily delicious, come spilling out of a different roll. There are whoopie pies and Del's lemonade and an array of East Coast oysters brimming with briny-sweet liquor. In the case of the cold one, that butter is whipped into a scratch mayonnaise that lightly cloaks yet more lobster, holding it together ever so gently lest it topple from the sides of the toasted, split-top bun (which, mind you, is also brushed with lobster butter pre-toasting (Lobster Inception, you might say also: I’m drooling)). That rich, lobster-tinged butter goes right back onto the lobster in the case of the warm lobster roll. The hunks of lobster in its lobster rolls are first poached in butter. It’s a fairly straight-forward one, actually, offering many of the same dishes you’d find at any roadside clam shack from Rhode Island north through Maine.Īnd: Izzy's closes in Miami, full-steam ahead in Fort Myers he’s worked with the likes of Todd English, Grant Achatz and Graham Elliot - is the menu’s executor.Īnd, from what I’ve eaten, that menu is in very good hands. Jamie, a chef whose resume includes stints with Wolfgang Puck and Geoffrey Zakarian, is the curator of Izzy’s menu.
She hails from Rhode Island, and it was a road trip through her tiny home state (with their daughter Isabela, aka Izzy, in tow) that led the couple down this chicly New England-ish path. If Ford’s Garage is Walt Disney, Izzy’s is Ralph Lauren - pair your finest blazer with a crisp pink polo shirt and you’ll blend right in.Ĭredit Izzy’s chef-creator Jamie DeRosa and his wife, Amy, for this vibe. It’s in the aqua-colored glass tiles lining the bar and the white-marble tables on which you dine. It comes from the massive squid painted on white-washed brick in the soaring main dining room, and from the cloud-gray wainscoting tacked beneath it. Yes, it marched in and took over the former home of the long-beloved French Connection.Īnd, yes, the concept - New England-style seafood as filtered through the original (though now defunct) Miami location - seems a bit odd.īut then you sit down, you look around, and you think: Where am I? Yes, it’s another downtown Fort Myers restaurant involving the Kearns Restaurant Group (the company’s seventh, if my math’s right, six of which line First Street). To properly review Izzy’s Fish & Oyster, you have to let some things go.
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