Five Essential Dishes to Order at Strange Delight in Brooklyn 

1. Charbroiled Oysters

“We knew we wanted to do a version of these after our trips to New Orleans, and our favorite versions come from Felix’s. It’s not just about the flavor. As soon as you walk into Felix’s, you smell the chargrilled oysters. There’s this butane-y gasoline scent in the air in the best way possible — I’m someone who loved hanging out in the gas station just so I could smell it.

“Then there’s the smell of charring parm and bubbling butter, and that’s wafting in the air. We knew that we wanted you to have a similar experience as soon as you walked into Strange Delight, so we didn’t change too much from what Felix’s version is, which is very simple.

“We wanted to use a nicer parm, which is one of the changes that we made here. We take a lot of black pepper, a lot of garlic, fry it off in some butter until it’s aromatic but not necessarily deeply toasted, then deglaze with a lot of wine, and then reduce that all the way down.

“We knead that into butter, and that’s what we top the oysters with. As soon as they come out of the pizza oven, we shower them with some parm in the way that Felix taught us. Then, pop them back into the oven, all nice and bubbly, and then they’re ready to go.

“[This dish is] a really, really good example of what we try to do here. We take a lot of inspiration directly from Felix’s and then we just translate them to us, using local New York oysters, using nicer local butter, using a nice white wine – our version is born.”

2. Barbecue Shrimp

“This is a direct inspiration from the birthplace of barbecue shrimp, Pascal’s Manale. That was pretty much the only thing we got when we went there — my partners, Anoop, Michael, and myself each got our own bowl of barbecue shrimp and we crushed it.

“The main flavor profile that you get is a lot of black pepper, a lot of butter, and a lot of Worcestershire sauce. We took that base and added our own flair to it. The legend goes that they have this bubbling cauldron of barbecue sauce that simmers all day at Pascal’s Manale. Ours takes a full eight hours to fully reduce. We empty out a couple cases of white ale, which is our touch. The citrus-y notes of a white ale, once reduced, goes really nicely with seafood and it lightens up all of that butter and plays really nicely with the black pepper.

“All together it’s our house Creole seasoning, a lot of black pepper, a lot of garlic, the beer, Worcestershire, and butter. We just fill up the largest pot we have and pop it on first thing in the morning and it bubbles all day until it’s reduced, and thick, and sweet, and pungent, and savory, and a little spicy.

“We take that sauce and you get three really nice shrimp. They’re a lot larger than you would find in New Orleans, because we really wanted it to be a really messy ‘get in there with your hands’ experience. We serve it shell-on, head-on, so you rip the shell off, you suck the juices out of the head, then you have a giant shrimp left over to enjoy and dip in the sauce.

“We serve that with a couple of warm rolls. Everyone knows there’s nothing worse than having a bunch of sauce left behind and nothing to dip it in, so we make sure to serve rolls with it. This is the one dish that we serve with wet naps, because we want you to get dirty. You get a chance to wipe your hands at the end of it all.”

3. Crab Dirty Rice

“Thai food is one of my favorite cuisines. I love the version of crab rice from Fish Cheeks NoHo, and the Uncle Boons crab fried rice is something I think about a lot even though they’re not around anymore.

“It’s one of my favorite things to eat, so it made sense to do a version of that here … you would find crab dirty rice all over New Orleans. We wanted to take inspiration from both cuisines and combine them into our dirty rice. We use Tamaki Gold, which is a short grain rice that you’d find at a lot of sushi places. I love Tamaki Gold for anything saucy or any kind of fried rice application. I feel like it’s the perfect chewiness and grain size for all those things. We cook it and lay it out on a sheet tray and let it dry overnight, just so we can get it really nice and crisp.

“Then we make what we call a creole XO sauce. XO sauce is a traditional condiment that you find a lot in Hong Kong – it’s dried shrimp, cognac, and Chinese ham cooked down together with aromatics until it’s really jammy. We took out some [of the traditional] aromatics and then subbed in a lot of aromatics you’d find in Louisiana cuisine. So, we cook it down with Trinity — bell pepper, celery, and onions, and some garlic until it completely collapses on itself and it’s almost a paste. We mix that in with dried scallop and dried shrimp. We omit the ham because we wanted to keep this completely pescatarian friendly. And then, instead of cognac, we deglaze it with a lot of Herbsaint, which brings a beautiful anise note that plays off the crab and seafood really, really nicely.

“We finish it with some Steen’s, which is a Louisiana cane syrup, for sweetness, a little more of our creole seasoning, and then some salt, sugar and MSG. What you’re left with is XO sauce that spent a summer abroad in Louisiana and came back with new ideas.

“We’re a fully electric kitchen, and we have two sources of heat. We have a deck oven that we inherited and a fryer — so we definitely do not have a wok burner. The question was, ‘Can you stir fry in a pizza oven?’ And you absolutely can. We leave our carbon steel pans in the oven at around 600 degrees until they’re ripping hot, pull that out and then hit that with some oil, and then we start sautéing our rice right away. It’s that dance of going in and out of the pizza oven until we’re happy with the crispiness level. And then we finish it with parsley, some chives, and some celery, and then some lump crab meat. We toss that in right at the end. We don’t want the celery to lose its crispy texture, and we don’t want the crab meat to get hammered. Then we add an egg as well, scrambled and folded in. It’s finished with more salt, sugar, and MSG, piled onto an oval plate, and completely showered in finely minced chives.”

4. Fried Shrimp Loaf

“This was heavily inspired by Casamento’s. Everyone’s familiar with the po’boy – we serve them as a delivery-only special, but we also wanted to go in a different direction. Casamento’s serves loaves which are similar fillings to what you’d find on a po’boy, but they put it in these giant Pullman loaves. We wanted to reinterpret that for New York, so we sourced some really nice milk bread from Paris Baguette and that’s what we build the sandwiches on.

“There’s something magical about having fried, crunchy things in between soft milk bread like that. The texture is something I will never get tired of. We do a swipe of mayo. We use Blue Plate currently to keep it traditional – we don’t want to get anyone angry. Then a swipe of our house giardiniera mix. It’s giardiniera and olives and a lot of Italian dressing-like seasonings that we blitzed together into a spread.

“We also use fairly large tiger shrimp so you can get that really beautiful cross section when you cut the sandwich in half. It’s cornmeal-dredged and fried, with crisp lettuce and tomato. We didn’t want to mess around with it too much because the individual components are so delicious. From the beginning, that’s been one of our most popular Instagram-y things.”

5. Blackened Swordfish Belly

“This is another dish that we’ve had since the beginning. We wanted to do our version of blackened fish — everyone knows what that means. It’s one of those terms that you immediately associate with Louisiana. We have our own house Creole seasoning mix that we use throughout the restaurant, with all of the spices sourced from Burlap & Barrel. We go through it so much that they actually are blending it for us now, which is a great help.

“When I was looking for a fish I knew that it’s hard to cook fish to a specific temperature in a pizza oven consistently. I wanted something that was really fatty that we could get really charred on the outside without losing a lot of moisture on the inside. A lot of those [kinds of cuts] are prohibitively expensive, just by nature — your tuna bellies and things like that. We didn’t want an $80 four-ounce portion of fish.

“Luckily, I’ve used swordfish belly in the past, and it’s not a cut that a lot of people know about, and it’s not a very popular cut. It’s since become a lot more popular since we put it on the menu, which is good for the swordfish sellers, but it’s made the price go up. But initially, when we first started, it was quite affordable.

“It has this incredible texture. It’s interlaced with so much fat, but there’s enough meat hanging on to it that it doesn’t feel like you’re eating a block of fat. It’s just this really juicy, tender, plush meat that is perfect for roasting because you can get that really beautiful varnish crust on the outside without sacrificing any of the interior. As soon as you cut into the swordfish, you just see it gush its beautiful, delicious juices, which is exactly what we’re going for.

“We wanted to keep the rest of the plate pretty simple, just because the swordfish is such a star and you don’t want to take too much away from it. I love watercress. I think it’s an underused green that brings you a little bit of bitterness, a nice level of crunch. We do a simple herb and watercress salad dressed in lemon juice and olive oil. My other favorite thing to eat with really fatty meats I borrowed from a lot of prime rib plate houses — a big dollop of horseradish cream. Horseradish and fatty meats are just perfect together. We make a horseradish and creole mustard cream that we just kind of dollop on the plate, and then you’re left to your own devices. You can just crush the belly on its own. You can smear it in the horseradish. You can make your own little swordfish belly salad. Everyone eats it in their own magical way.”

Strange Delight opens for dinner at 5 p.m. nightly, and is open for lunch Friday through Sunday from 11:30 a.m. until 3:30 p.m.

Ellie Plass is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. Follow her on Instagram and X. Follow Resy, too.