It's the weird one on the Shem Creek strip: where most spots there are beach bars with a cooler and a grill, NICO is a French oyster bar, and it owns that identity completely. You'll drive past it on the way to the crowded tourist spots on Coleman Boulevard and wonder why you didn't just turn in. The raw bar is the whole reason - oysters pulled directly from farms along the East Coast, from a trio of South Carolina bivalves to East Capes from Prince Edward Island, and they serve them with the little adductor muscle still attached, which sounds like a footnote until you taste it. There's a full bar behind it too: craft cocktails, a curated wine and champagne list, and beers on tap, with a proper happy hour Monday through Friday.
The room sits on a patio that makes a French destination feel like it's on the dock, and the whole place is the kind of thing that's reserved some nights and loud and party-y on others. It's the expensive end of the strip, and it's not for everyone, but if you want oysters and a glass of Sancerre somewhere that actually thinks about where its shellfish came from, this is the stop.