Australian oysters: better than the French ones?

The best oysters in the world come from Brittany. Many gourmets say this, and I was too on my last visit There you are sure that nothing in the world can beat this delicacy, enjoyed with a view over the rough coast and the salty Atlantic air around your nose. Then I traveled to Perth, Australia and ate one for the first time in my life Saccostrea glomerata.

I asked my Australian companion about local specialties. On the plates brought to our table were small shrimp tarts, a ceviche of fresh scallops with macadamia milk and, beautifully arranged on a bed of pebbles, oysters. The native ones found only in Australia (and sometimes New Zealand): Saccostrea glomerata. They are significantly smaller than that Magellan gigas, the most commercially important oyster specieswhich also dominates menus in Europe – although it actually comes from the Western Pacific and is accordingly called Pacific oyster.

I probably wouldn’t have ordered the Australian oysters myself, as I said: the Brittany ones! I was secretly looking at the small tart with blue swimmer crab, a type of crab native to Australia and revered by the Aussies. To warm myself up, I grabbed an oyster first.

I sipped, tasted and beamed. The meat was so sweet, fresh and buttery! While Pacific oysters often make you feel like you’re putting a big bite of ocean in your mouth, these were like an elegant seafood morsel. They lacked the gelatinous quality, some say gooey, which makes many people shy away from oysters.

The best oysters in the world, I now knew, do not come from Brittany, but from Australia. From then on I took every opportunity to eat some. Because, as I googled right after leaving the restaurant, in our latitudes they are Saccostrea glomerata unfortunately not bred anywhere. So I shamelessly stood next to the oyster bar at the wine event in Perth’s hinterland to fill my stomach with freshly opened mussels and took detours in my camper to stock up at oyster farms.

Although prices vary, oysters, like other seafood, are not a luxury item in Australia. Or rather, the sophisticated fuss that is made about it in many countries is missing. In Australia you have lobster for a BBQ and tiger prawns for a picnic on the beach. It’s probably this nonchalance that makes the seafood taste so good there.

Often the Saccostrea glomerata also offered as Sydney Rock Oyster, because on the east coast around Sydney A large part of it is bred. Breeding takes place in river estuaries and usually through natural reproduction, for which the larvae floating in the water are collected on wooden slats or chains.

This process can also be found in European oyster regions. In many places, however, people rely on more predictable reproduction using larvae from breeding stations. It takes around three and a half years until the Rock Oysters weigh around 50 grams and are therefore ready for harvest. Pacific oysters grow much faster and in some places are harvested after just twelve months.

You can find both at the Sydney fish market. The market is an institution, it is the largest in the southern hemisphere and is open every day of the year except December 25th. There is a lot of activity there, especially around the Christmas and New Year holidays. The New Year is still fresh when I set off early in the morning with a few friends for a very special breakfast in this inconspicuous hall in the west of the city center.

In 2026, the market will celebrate its 60th birthday at this location – in a new building that was built right next to the old hall by Danish star architects, larger, more modern, more spectacular. It will be inaugurated on January 19th. We can only admire it from the outside, but we don’t really care because after all, we’re here to eat. We taste fried butter crabs, octopus balls and fried lobster with garlic pasta. The highlight: the oysters. Even the friend who doesn’t actually like oysters says it.