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From oyster bar to tasting menu, new French Quarter restaurant is a seafood lover’s dream.Louisiana waters offer a treasure trove of seafood, some abundant and familiar, some so rarely seen on menus that it counts as exotic.Now, New Orleans has an elegant new restaurant devoted to Gulf seafood and designed to present much more of its possibilities.The Crustacean Club (1036 N.Rampart St.) opened in the French Quarter in May.It gives two different approaches.One room is called the Oyster Bar, a walk-in proposition for raw oysters, cocktails and snacks.The main act is in the Club Room, a 22-seat, reservation-only dining space serving a chef’s tasting menu exclusively, with multiple courses and plenty of surprises all changing around the local catch.“We have a lot more to say about what you can do with Gulf seafood,” co-owner Brenna Sanders said.Two chefs, one vision She and her husband, Evan Ingram, are co-chefs.They know the Rampart Street space well.It was previously home to the Champagne bar Effervescence.The two chefs ran its kitchen from the start in 2017.When Effervescence’s founder retired and closed the spot last summer, the couple was able to take over and turn it into their own restaurant.Sanders, who is originally from Alabama, and Ingram, who is from California, met while cooking at Restaurant August, and later worked at Michelin-rated restaurants in San Francisco.Now, they are pouring that experience into their love of local seafood.“New Orleans is a seafood city, and there are so many fisher people in Louisiana close to the city,” said Ingram.“There’s so much we can do and bring to people.” The chefs fixed on the tasting menu format to serve small tastes of numerous types of seafood, to encourage experimentation by the diner.It also opens the door for what they can serve.They don’t need a week’s worth of one type of seafood; a small haul of a specific fish can field a course for a night.At the Oyster Bar The Crustacean Club has an elegant look and an easygoing bearing with cute touches and friendly winks.Like the Champagne bar before it, the centerpiece remains a large, marble-topped bar.Half of it is now devoted to the oyster bar and chilled seafood displays, where chefs prepare cold dishes.This front room is the Oyster Bar, and it includes a lounge seating and a row of tables, with plush sea creature throw pillows for a dash of color.Here, the restaurant serves a variety of Gulf oysters, caviar (local bowfin and pricier imports), fries (similar to what the chefs serve at Effervescence) and rotating seafood small plates specials, like ceviche shooters and tuna carpaccio.A casual meal can be made from just this.The Club Room, for the tasting menu, is found through a set of curtains, like a semi-private dining room.It sets a different vibe, with dark finishes, a fun fish-patterned wallpaper, a chef’s library of books and spices and a lovely Venetian chandelier above.Exploring the tasting menu The tasting menu is structured as five courses but brings much more than five different dishes.A series of one-bite canapes starts off dinner.That could include a “campfire oyster,” grilled and smoked and dabbed with miso garlic butter.These bites are followed by a chilled platter of three dishes, dubbed the “chill of the day.” One line-up brought delicately poached shrimp in a coconut milk sauce together with smoked crab claws and a yellow eye snapper crudo with “swamp dashi,” a light broth made with charred fish bones.The daily hot dish is a changing menu centerpiece — like the opening example of a stuffed crab, which sounds familiar but was made with chermoula — the smoky, spicy Moroccan garnish — and covered with whipped pomme puree so rich it ran like a sauce over the shell and was heavily imbued with crab fat for an intense crab flavor.Salad, charred vegetables and house-baked rolls (with scallop-shaped butter pads) round out the menu before the sweet finales, usually with a light, refreshing dessert in the mix to complement the seafood dinner (strawberry and lime meringue on the opening menu).Like Effervescence, the bar still has lots of sparkling wine, including a robust selection of Champagne, and a variety of more affordable styles, including prosecco and cremant.Bubbles do shine when paired with seafood, though the bar also has a range of classic cocktails.The High Tide martini is a delight, with some assembly required.The petite cocktail comes with an iced garnished plate with a martini reload at the ready, and a dropper to add more swamp water, for a dose of liquid umami between the gin and vodka.The Crustacean Club 1036 N.Rampart St.5-10 p.m.Thu.-Sun.