It’s the ultimate seafood – and there’s nowhere better to tuck in than at Wiltons in St James’s.

You can tuck in to a few oysters in a half-decent pub these days, but nothing compares to eating a fine, salty bivalve in an establishment that is truly passionate about them. After all, a big part of enjoying the things is in the preamble. The shucking. The careful placement on ice. The stand on which they arrive. Before you have tipped a still-alive oyster into your mouth, your taste buds should sense they are about to encounter something special. And doing so somewhere that fully understands this can make them taste that little bit sweeter.

To say Wiltons in St James’s, London, is passionate about oysters is a bit of an understatement. It may be more accurate to say Wiltons is defined by them. Celebrating its 275th anniversary this year, Wiltons was founded in 1742 (making it older than the US) by Haymarket oyster purveyor Mr George William Wilton. In 1836 it gained its first of six royal warrants to supply the royal household with oysters – and it has been serving the finest bivalves from the British Isles ever since. Given this month sees native oysters (the seasonal, subtle, meatier, buttery cousin of the rock oyster) come into season, and to help celebrate their anniversary, Wiltons is hosting a series of oyster masterclasses at its restaurant. A feature of the classes will be “Oysters Christian Dior” – a dish that came from the man himself and featured in his cookbook, La Cuisine Cousu-Main, which he released in 1972. He would instruct the Wiltons staff to make it for him whenever he visited. Below, we asked Wiltons head chef Mr Daniel Kent for the recipe, and for a few of his favourite facts about oysters and Wiltons.

Makes 6

6 oysters 20ml manzanilla sherry 80ml white wine sauce 6 slices truffle 2 tbsp whipped cream 1 egg yolk 1/8 tsp truffle oil 1/8 tsp salt

Open the oysters, remove from the shells and keep in their juices. In a small pan reduce the sherry then add the oyster juice and reduce until you have about 1 tbsp of liquid. Warm up the oysters very slowly in the reduction. Add the white wine sauce and heat gently. Drain the oysters on fish paper. Place back into the cleaned shells. Place a julienne of truffle on top of each oyster. Add the whipped cream and egg yolk to the sauce. Coat the oysters with the sauce then glaze under a very hot grill.

“Tasting oysters is like wine, but instead of experiencing the terroir you are tasting the sea,” says Mr Kent. “The taste differs due to the temperature of the sea, the salinity, the method of farming and the environmental conditions. You should eat oysters like wine: unadulterated. I would suggest chewing them and then taking in a little air so you can feel the full flavour develop in the mouth.”

“In his 1861 book The Oyster: Where, How And When To Find, Breed, Cook And Eat It, Eustace Clare Grenville Murray described Wiltons as a place ‘where you may eat oysters as fine as anywhere in London, and with this advantage, that here they are always opened in the lower shell, without the trouble of asking, which is necessary at other places if you would preserve the tonic liquor which nature herself intended should be the only sauce for our favourite mollusc’. This sums us up to this day,” says Mr Kent.

“Our legendary oyster ‘shucker’ Jimmy Marks once threw out the Michelin guide as he said, ‘Who wants to be judged by a tyre manufacturer?’” says Mr Kent. “Nowadays, Wiltons enters competitions to beat worldwide competitors from the European Oyster Opening Championship in Sweden to the World Championship in Galway.”