S&D Oyster Company turns 50 on September 16, and it’s throwing itself an anniversary week worth planning around. The Uptown seafood spot has been serving the same stretch of McKinney Avenue since 1976, and five decades in one location is rare enough on its own to be worth celebrating properly.
Herb and Mary Kay Story opened S&D after Herb’s years as a Navy fighter pilot stationed along the Gulf Coast gave the couple a taste for the region’s seafood they couldn’t shake once they came home to Dallas. Both SMU graduates, they built the restaurant around family recipes and what Mary Kay picked up learning from Louisiana cooks, and named it after their two children, Stephanie and Doak. The Bellomy Group, the brothers behind that name, took over ownership in 2023, and by all accounts kept the formula exactly as it was rather than trying to modernize it.
The anniversary celebration runs the better part of two weeks. Throughout the week, 50% off all draft beer and $19.76 pricing on commemorative 50th Anniversary merchandise, a nod to the restaurant’s founding year, will be available, including limited-edition logo T-shirts, hats, and two-piece whiskey glass sets.
The actual anniversary, Wednesday, September 16, gets its own special pricing: 50-cent Gulf oysters and 50% off all alcohol for the entire day.
The celebration continues into the weekend with a bigger event on Saturday, September 19, bringing back the 50% off draft beer and merchandise pricing, plus live music from a trio out of the Revelers Hall Band, playing from noon to 3 p.m. and again from 6 to 9 p.m. Recreations of the restaurant’s original menus will be set out on tables that day too, a small, genuinely nice touch for anyone curious what a seafood dinner on McKinney Avenue cost back in 1976.
S&D Oyster Company is located at 2701 McKinney Ave. in Dallas.
