Oysterfest 2015

This year’s Oysterfest was bigger than ever before. Raising money for charity, the festival gathered thousands of food and music lovers to the new location at the Peel Basin for two days of sampling delicious food, listening to local music, watching and participating in plating and cocktail competitions and of course shucking over 30,000 oysters. Read on!

The festival appears to have been another major success for Daniel Notkin and his team of oyster aficionados (official numbers will be out soon), raising money for the Open Pier Foundation and bringing awareness to the cause. With vendors from across the city selling tasty food and live music from Jonas, Shane Murphy and more, raising money was never more delicious.

As Oysterfest continues to grow, it continues to require bigger venues to house absolutely everything needed to keep people comfortable and to pull every part of the event off smoothly. Compared to Terrasses Bonsecours, the Peel Basin was a much larger venue with the festival taking up two full quays and spilling out under the highway. Though many may have preferred the more intimate and shaded comfort of Terrasses Bonsecours, Oysterfest’s massive popularity requires more sprawl due to increased capacity and of course the FUN factor!

In 7 years Oysterfest has grown from a simple parking lot block party to one of the most important and highly anticipated festivals of the year in Montreal. The effort to make each edition bigger and better is driven by the thousands of satisfied people that the festival has been drawing every year. As Oysterfest draws to a close once again, people continue to promise to be back next year in bigger numbers and to date they have been keeping their word.