The Saints of Sedalia’s

A Fine Time for Oysters and Wine

The day is as gray and chilly as the shell of a Kumamoto oyster. Oklahoma winds rush through us while the place beyond the chain link fence sells playground equipment. The rest of the block is antique malls, cell phone stores, dispensaries, and the State Fair complex mostly used for Future Farmers of America’s hog wrangling and gun shows when it’s not flooded with funnel cake stands and precarious carny rides decorated with mild copyright infringement.

It is noon and Silvana Walters brings out a bottle of chilled natural white wine and three cups and pours one for herself, one for her husband, Zack, and one for me. They are the owners of Sedalia’s, a seafood and wine bar. Inside the restaurant, chefs are preparing for their late afternoon opening.

Silvana details her experience growing up in Cochabamba, Bolivia before immigrating with her family to the United States in 2000. Cochabamba is a part of Bolivia in a temperate valley with a climate similar to Los Angeles. Her mother and aunt ran a butcher’s shop, selling liver, offal (organ meats), and sausages. They would wake up at 3 a.m. to go to the market every day. “I hated spending time in the market, I would get bored,” Silvana laughs. “There was so much blood around.”

A minivan pulls up and the driver pops the trunk. Inside are netted bags of oysters, shipped daily from their purveyors on both coasts. While the staff helps schlep the haul inside and Silvana deals with the invoice, Zack, an Oklahoma native, tells me about his experiences in culinary school in San Francisco, and then heading up a Los Angeles restaurant, Salt’s Cure, before he and Silvana decided it was time to bring something different to OKC.

Make no mistake, when you arrive at Sedalia’s, your first thought might be “Uhh, am I in the right place?” The interior is as cramped as a little hamburger stand and the patio looks like it’s a dive bar. For OKC clientele, the visuals do not immediately convey the high quality of food and wine or the intentionality behind the cooking. This is my kind of place.

“Our philosophy here is to be conscious enough about our ingredients to have a product people will be excited about,” Zack explains. “We want to be very different from any other restaurant that Oklahoma City is used to.”

And that they are. It feels like some place you might stumble upon in Hermosa Beach, CA and have the best oysters and crudo of your life and wash it all down with a $20 bottle of nicely curated French wine that has the minerality and acidity to balance your meal.

Sedalia’s cooking is ingredient driven, letting the flavors of the sea speak for themselves, but prepared by people with serious culinary backgrounds. The staff is few and includes the talented Harmon sisters, Alysha and Ashley, who have a combined forty years working at high-end restaurants from New York, to Atlanta, to Florida, serving celebrities like Oprah and President Barack Obama.

This neighborhood dive just happens to bring in some of the freshest seafood in town and balances it out with an unconventional but very affordable wine list. Their sourcing is key. Over the years, Zack has gotten to know some distributors who can bring in exceptional products. The menu is constantly in flux, as seasonality is important to seafood. Sustainability is a touchy subject, but Sedalia’s is mindful of this.

“This is a very controversial topic, but with fishing, I do not believe there is any sustainability in the oceans whatsoever. Unless you’re doing 100% farmed fish in the oceans, it’s not sustainable, but even that is controversial because it’s taking up all the sardines, anchovies, there’s so many things that have gone wrong,” Zach explains.

“We are doing all the best things we can do, but it’s such a loaded topic,” he continues. “Oysters and mussels, any bivalves, are the most sustainable to me, not only to help filtration, but the rejuvenation of the ocean. We specifically use a lot more shellfish than anything else because of our focus on sustainability.”

A wine rep comes by to taste them on some new Italian wines for their consideration, cutting our conversation short in favor of discussing the detailed flavor notes of these vinos. Before I leave, Silvana brings me a metal tray with two oysters, a knife, and a towel, and lets me get a few shucks in. Between their briny taste and the blustery weather, I feel like I’m oceanside.

> Sedalia’s, 2727 NW 10th Street, Oklahoma City, (405) 626-8249, sedaliasokc.com