Oysters on the Half Shell
Raw oysters first came to me in the most unlikely of places, the Mirage hotel in Las Vegas. I was around twelve years old, and we were at a pretty nice restaurant on the casino floor. My father has always like raw oysters, but I had never tried them. I saw them on the menu and I just figured I’d give them a shot. I remember actually in pretty vivid detail how they were presented. There were a dozen oysters all arranged on a platter of crush ice with cocktail sauce and a lemon that was wrapped in that veil like material they use in fancy restaurants. I could tell that they had tried to glorify these oysters as much as possible, but you really cannot make oysters ever look too appetizing. I looked at them and remember thinking, why would anybody ever choose to eat these things? They looked like giant loogies in a barnacle-covered shell. My dad told me how to eat them, and there are actually quite a lot of options to eating such a simple food. You can take them back straight out on the shell, you can put them on a cracker, and you can do both with your choice of cocktail sauce or lemon juice or both. The first one, I ate straight out of the shell with nothing on it, just to get the full affect of what oysters really taste like, which happens to be nothing. It is a strange food because you don’t really chew or even leave it in your mouth for long at all. You open your throat and take it back. But for some reason I instantly loved this food. By the time I finished the platter I had tried every single different way to eat them, and my favorite way is still straight out of the shell with both cocktail sauce and lemon juice, followed closely by on a cracker with Tabasco. This experience gave rise to the rest of my oyster-eating career.
I said that it was odd that Las Vegas was the first place I ever tried oysters for two reasons. Firstly Nevada is very much a land locked state, and secondly because I am a frequent beach go-er. My family owns a beach house in Santa Rosa, Florida, which is right near Destin, and within about two hours of the oyster capitol of the world, Apalachicola. Apalachicola is located where the Chattahoochee meets the ocean, and is widely regarded to have the best oysters anywhere. My father and I own a boat in Florida and are pretty avid saltwater fisherman. I have never lived in Florida but we travel there so often, we’re basically considered locals. I feel almost more at home in Florida than I do in Atlanta, and I also love seafood. The oysters in Florida are much better and much cheaper than those oysters they have in Las Vegas. They serve them differently too. I’ve eaten tons of oysters since Las Vegas and I have never since seen them served on a platter of crushed ice. In Florida they serve them on the trays you get at Wendy’s or somewhere. This is the way they should be served. I mean fancying up oysters is kind of like putting a dress on Rosy O'Donnel: it really dosn' hide anything. Oysters are pretty much good anywhere on the panhandle, but occasionally I’ll be treated to the absolute best when we take a fishing trip down to Apalachicola. There is a little Podunk old bar on the way there called the Indian Pass Oyster bar. Despite it’s modest looks, this bar I constantly frequented by locals and tourist who have heard of it’s lore. This place has the best oysters in Apalachicola, and if Apalachicola has the best oysters there are to offer, then simply put, the best oysters in the world can be traced to one single Podunk oyster bar in the middle of nowhere. We make an obligatory stop here on the way in and out of Apalachicola.
The criteria for what makes a good oyster, is pretty much how bad it’s not. Oysters go bad fairly quickly, and the fresher they are the better. When you go out fishing in Apalachicola, there are always tons of oyster boats digging out there. They way they do it is by taking basically two giant rakes and scooping oysters out of the mud and piling them up on the boat. This is not an appetizing event to watch, but it sheds some light on what makes some oysters better than others. The oysters sit on the boat the entire day out in the sun. The longer they sit the worse they are. This is why oysters are better in the winter months. It also explain the obvious, that the less the oysters have travel the better they are. And this accounts for why oysters are the best in Apalachicola.
I remember going to an oyster bar earlier this summer in Apalachicola with my dad and hid friend. We had them fry up a big trout I’d caught, and ordered a bunch of crab legs and oysters too. My dad and I both ordered a dozen on the half shell, which means raw, and his friend ordered twelve oyster baked Rockefeller style - pussy. No I’m just kidding baked oysters are good too. But when we were walking out I saw quite a spectacle around the bar. There was a kid about twelve years old with a raw oyster in the shell in his hands. He was looking at it like it was some kind of mysterious object he had found, and there was a large crowd around him chanting for him to eat it. The kid looked scared but I guess a gust of bravery hit him as threw back his head and took the oyster like it was a shot from hell. Everyone clapped and he said, “wow, that was disgusting.” I laughed and couldn’t help from feeling like this kid had now been initiated into the world of raw oyster eating. I actually felt proud for him.