#4: Oysters Giovanni @ Cafe Giovanni
Chef Duke Locicero won a big cooking contest years ago with this dish, and it's easy to see why. It starts out with money in the bank: fried oysters, crisp with cornmeal at the exterior, still bulging. A bunch of those are arrayed in a circle on a plate spread with a unique brown sauce. It tastes like nothing else I know: sweet, gingery, savory, a little peppery--hard to describe, but perfect with oysters. In that sauce three colorful fruit-flavored sauces get swirled in to make a stained-glass effect. My first impression was that this was too much fooling around, but the sauces actually add quite a nice flavor. It's such a terrific dish that it's hard to go to Café Giovanni without starting dinner off with these. At the very least, get an order to pass around the table.
