Perla's
Larry McGuire and Tommy Moorman Jr. opened Perla's on South Congress in April 2009, in the room where Mars had closed the December before. The mound of East Coast oysters sits at the head of a long bar, iced, and that is what to eat.
Why go
The room took over the former home of Mars, which had closed that December, and opened with a deck of picnic tables and beach-club umbrellas facing South Congress.5 Mike Sutter gave it the Statesman's Newcomer of the Year that first year, and the reason he gave still describes the place: it succeeds at being new because it feels like it is not new at all.5 Odam makes the same point from the other end, in 2025. The restaurant is one of the defining local businesses on an avenue besieged by national brands in recent years.
And it has never drifted into the self-driving lane of a tourist trap.
2 Some of the menu has not moved in that time. Odam counts the lobster grits, the grilled snapper with red chimichurri and the grilled octopus with crunchy potatoes as dishes old enough to drive,
and two of the three were on Sutter's plate in 2012.25
Order this / avoid
- Order: the oysters, by the dozen. Odam named two of them in 2024:
briny Barstools from Prince Edward Island and meaty Poseidons from Massachusetts.
8 - Then the lobster grits, which have been on the menu since the first year.5
- From the rest of it, Odam picks
bronzed seared scallops, simply grilled redfish, indulgent dishes like firm bucatini woven through hunks of lobster.
2 - Avoid: a walk-in on Saturday night or Sunday. Time Out warns to expect a wait then, and the prices, as it puts it,
reflect the location.
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What locals & experts say
- Matthew Odam ranked it No. 2 of five in his March 2026 list of the city's seafood restaurants, and the sentence he leads on is about geography:
no seafood restaurant in Austin transports you to the ocean like Perla's.
1 - He has it on both of the last two Statesman dining guides, at No. 29 in 2024 and under Seafood in 2025, where he calls it
the best roster of oysters in town.
32 - In 2024 he judged the shucking against the map: the selection is
as good as any restaurant located 150 miles from saltwater.
4 - Mike Sutter, giving it Newcomer of the Year for the Statesman in 2012, got the founders' own framing from McGuire:
fine dining-caliber food for the masses.
Esquire had put it on its best-new-restaurants list that same month.5 - Kelly Stocker, for Time Out Austin, wrote the patio up as the draw and named the whole vermillion snapper, the crispy seabass, the lobster bucatini and the crab cake benedict.6
Good to know
- Service runs all day: lunch on weekdays, brunch at the weekend, a bar and snacks menu in the afternoon, dinner every night.7
- The patio is half the restaurant, and can be bought out along with the indoor room.7
- Not to be confused with Asador at Las Perlas. That is a different restaurant, two miles away on East 7th Street.
Verdict
should-visit — Come for the oysters. Everything else on this enormous menu is a way of extending the meal around them, and Odam rates the roster the best in the city. You do pay for the address, so a weekday lunch on the deck buys the same shucking for less.