"The newspaper local to SE CT, The Day, ran a January 2019 article not about the restaurant in general, but specifically about its newly initiated vegan menu. Living 15 miles away, I duly put this fancy eatery on my list of 1001 restaurants to visit before I die. Yet, view its sparse Vegan sub-menu online, and you’ll see that aside from the 2 salads there are only 6 dishes, 3 sides, and 1 dessert. That’s hardly more than you’d expect to find at any other restaurant that does not build up such high expectations. Hey, Oyster Guys, at first I decided that I likely would die with this clam shack still on my to-do list. Not until April of 2022 did a non-vegan friend and I decide that it was time to die, or I mean, time to check out that Vegan sub-menu. We arrived at 2pm on a weekday during non-tourist season and innocently expected to be seated. Instead we were politely informed that without advance reservations our wait to be seated would take up to half an hour. Non-resolute, we decided to sit that one out, and instead ate on the cheap at Karma Kitchen just down the block. Four months later, during the summer when downtown Mystic descends into one eternal traffic jam, a vegan friend and I were more resolute. We made advance reservations, again for 2pm on a weekday, intending afterwards to see a film at the quaint Mystic Cinema. Whereas a line of hungry people lacking reservations again was waiting outside the restaurant, we were immediately and very efficiently ushered in by the alert and attentive waitstaff. So if you plan to eat here, be sure to make reservations! And be sure to wait for when the weather allows for seating on the outdoor patio surrounded by an array of flowering plants abuzz with hummingbirds and sparrows. And from the patio, you can view the tourists parading along the drawbridge, walking faster afoot than the car traffic jam inching alongside them. And did I say that there’s a vegan menu to be had here? The food is unique even for vegan cuisine, it meets my own high nutritional standards (no fried foods here and no mock meats here, mock foods that make a mockery of veganism), tastes good, and is elegantly presented. But don’t dine here just for the food. Dine here also for the tourist-mecca Mystic experience, and for the satisfaction of knowing that the reality of veganism has infiltrated even the upper echelons of high society."
