RESTAURANT NEWS | OHIO
Cleveland’s New Oyster Bar Serves Second Chances
At EDWINS, students learn to shuck, prepare raw seafood, and build careers beyond incarceration.
EDWINS OYSTER BAR | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Jamie Dutton
5:20 a.m. CT, Sept. 9, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Jamie Dutton's job has her in airports regularly, as does a family spread out across the Midwest. She’s partial to BPTs and Bell’s.
The freshest oysters in Cleveland now arrive with a side of second chances.
EDWINS Oyster Bar opened in July in Cleveland Heights, a few steps from the French restaurant where Brandon Chrostowski has spent more than a decade using fine dining to help people rebuild their lives after incarceration. With 23 seats and no reservations, the new place is intimate enough to watch the work unfold across the bar.
Oysters shipped in daily anchor the menu, joined by salmon tartare, scallop crudo, ceviche, and seafood platters piled with the raw bar’s greatest hits. A short list of hot dishes includes steamed clams, razor clams, and mussels, while martinis and Champagne keep the whole production planted firmly in French raw-bar territory.
Brandon Chrostowski
The polished little restaurant also serves as a new classroom for the EDWINS Leadership & Restaurant Institute. Students learn to identify oysters, open them cleanly, prepare raw seafood, and handle the precise service that accompanies it. Those are marketable skills in an industry that can still offer a career without first asking where someone went to college or what life looked like before the application landed on the desk.
Chrostowski founded EDWINS in 2007 and opened its flagship restaurant at Shaker Square in 2013. The organization has since grown to include a butcher shop, bakery, culinary school, housing, family services, and training inside prisons. Its work became the subject of the Academy Award-nominated documentary short “Knife Skills,” and Chrostowski received the inaugural James Beard Foundation Impact Award in 2025.
The oyster bar carries that mission into one of restaurant service’s most specialized corners. Learning to shuck quickly is part of it. So is understanding the differences between East and West Coast oysters, building a chilled seafood platter, pairing it with wine, and guiding a guest through an unfamiliar menu with confidence.
That makes dinner here a particularly Cleveland combination: French technique, Midwestern hospitality, and a practical belief that people can move forward when someone hands them a knife, an apron, and a real opportunity. At EDWINS Oyster Bar, each shuck, garnish, and pour becomes part of the lesson.
At The Pretender in Noblesville, vintage hi-fi sound and chef Ricky Martinez’s menu meet.
By JAMIE DUTTON
Staten Island's new Aqualine serves seafood towers and an eight-course tasting menu.
By MARIA RODRIGUEZ