I’m perched on a bar stool at Madeira Park , slurping small, immaculately scrubbed oysters in a classic mignonette sauce. I nibble triangles of sourdough smeared with rich anchovy butter and decorated with radish, parsley, and pickled shallot. It doesn’t matter that I butter my mustache. A sip of the house white—a $12 glass of Muscadet Sèvre-et-Maine—and all concerns vanish. As Hemingway once remarked, “I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

Plans for french fries to drag through aioli. Plans for chicken-liver tartine with crisp apple, pecans, brandied prune, green-garlic mostarda, and dill fronds. Plans for a glass of punchy, well-chilled, cherry-colored Italian Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo rosé, to wash down the unctuous poulet rouge liver.

It’s a swell moment to d

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