Wiltons is most known for its oysters which one would expect as George William Wilton first opened his shellfish mongers close to Haymarket in 1742.
"It is located in Jermyn Street in the heart of London’s St James’s, is one of London’s oldest restaurants and is steeped in elegance and tradition.
"Wiltons has gained an enviable reputation for serving delicious dishes inspired by traditional British cuisine and is one of the few remaining restaurants in the UK that uses a carving trolley for daily lunch and Saturday dinner service.'
"The restaurant is a bastion of great British food, and is renowned for its seafood, game and of course, oysters.''
In 2022, I was in London with a Malaysian friend who liked oysters. To me, they were not so great with the briny (salt water) taste. He liked Irish oysters.
Oysters are concentrated on the west coast in Ireland. The industry is valued at about €50mn annually.
The Irish tend to drink Guinness with oysters.
The pairing between oysters and Guinness was first documented in 1837.
It was the earliest recorded mention of Guinness and food as a pair — Benjamin Disraeli is known to have had oysters
and Guissess stout on the night of November 21 1837 and described it as "the most remarkable day hitherto of my life"Benjamin Disraeli, (1804-1881), was a British statesman and novelist who was twice prime minister (1868, 1874–80) and who provided the Conservative Party with a twofold policy of Tory democracy and imperialism.
1835, Daniel O’Connell, (1775-1847), Britain’s first Irish Catholic Member of Parliament, attacked Benjamin Disraeli during a by-election. In the course of his unrestrained invective, the Irishman referred to Disraeli’s Jewish ancestry calling him the “worst possible type of Jew.”
Disraeli shot back in a letter to The Times newspaper. “Yes, I am a Jew,” he replied, “and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”
