The Walrus and the Carpenter, Seattle

The Walrus and the Carpenter, Seattle

Last week, I was visiting family in Seattle. My two brothers and I went to an oyster bar called The Walrus and the Carpenter [http://thewalrusbar.com/], where we slurped some of the best oysters ever, hoisted from waters off Washington, and shucked without a speck of shell in the oyster cup.



Prior to this trip, one of the best oysters I’d ever had was pulled from the Lynnhaven River in Virginia seconds before it was shucked by Chris Ludford, owner and operator of Pleasure House Oysters [http://pleasurehouseoysters.com/]. The oysters were bigger than I usually prefer, but so full of fresh flavor that I would gladly have eaten them all morning. As it was, I had about a dozen before lunch.

I remember to this day the exceptional oysters we had some years ago at Neptune Oyster [http://www.neptuneoyster.com/] in Boston, all of them pulled from water not far from the oyster bar. The oysters at Neptune were so good we had a few dozen for appetizers…then again as dessert. Couldn’t get enough of them; they were that good.

Oysters used to be shipped in sawdust to Chicago from the East Coast via the Erie Canal and through the Great Lakes. I’ve seen newspaper ads from the turn of the century touting that such oysters would keep for weeks. Maybe that’s true. It seems likely, however, that every second out of the water is a second’s worth of lost oyster flavor.

Oysters do, of course, live long after being extracted from the water. Out of water, however, they’re no longer doing what they do for a living, which is to filter the water all around them (in this way, oysters actually improve the watery environment in which they live). But all that water coursing through them helps oysters develop flavor, and it keeps them tasting crisp and delicious. Oysters removed for the water and eaten, oh, a day or so later, have been sitting in their own liquor for all that time, and they’re going to be just a little less fresh. They can still, of course, be delicious, just maybe not so delicious as they’d be if they’d been extracted from their watery homes just moments before.

All this has lead me to conclude that it’s perhaps impossible to eat oysters at their best anywhere but near where they’re harvested. This is not to say that oysters transported to this land-locked area are not good, but it seems the closer the dining table is to the water where the oysters grow, the better the oysters will be. Maybe this is an obvious observation, but in the past year or so, the difference between fresh-from-the-water and even a day-old has been dramatized for me.

In Seattle, we pulled into The Walrus and the Carpenter a little after 4PM and so were able to take advantage of happy hour (4-6), which meant half-price oysters, a very good thing as these oysters, all from Washington, were priced upwards of $4/each. I had a number of excellent oysters, but those from Otter Cove [http://www.penncoveshellfish.com/Products/Oysters/otter_cove.html] were probably my favorite. I’d had these oysters previously at Shaw’s Crab House – the best local source of oysters in my opinion – and remembered them as being spectacular. Here, they were stratospherically wonderful, and I’m guessing their freshness had a lot to do with it.



The Walrus and the Carpenter is not a fancy place, but it’s pleasantly appointed with a decent menu. My brother Kevin had the goat heart Carpaccio with pickled Saskatoon berries, which sounded interesting but was kind of stringy, iron-y tasting and not very exciting (despite the name).



My brother Kim had baked clams with bacon in a tomato-based sauce and it was pretty good, but I have to say: nothing compared to the oysters, which is all I ordered at this afternoon snack (had two dozen and could easily have eaten twice that). Oysters of this quality, this fresh, are rare…especially outside of the areas where they’re harvested, like the waters off Massachusetts, Washington State and Virginia. And it was in Virginia that I probably had my best oyster of the past year, pulled right out of the water by Ludford of Pleasure House Oysters, and put in my hand before the temperature of the oyster rose a degree or so higher than the temperature of the waters where it grew to become such a tasty thing.

You are of course exactly right Hammond: oyster goodness is directly proportional to freshness and thus inversely proportional to the time in seconds the beast has been detached from its moorings.

One of the most highly-regarded days of my life was that one, years ago, when I took Gault & Millau's advice to visit a small resto on the reach of the Belon estuary in Riec sur Belon, in Brittany. I have never had better huitres in my life; nor since.

We'll call the mathematical expression above "Hammond's Oyster Axiom."

Geo

Geo wrote:You are of course exactly right Hammond: oyster goodness is directly proportional to freshness and thus inversely proportional to the time in seconds the beast has been detached from its moorings.

One of the most highly-regarded days of my life was that one, years ago, when I took Gault & Millau's advice to visit a small resto on the reach of the Belon estuary in Riec sur Belon, in Brittany. I have never had better huitres in my life; nor since.

We'll call the mathematical expression above "Hammond's Oyster Axiom."

Geo

Belons are my favorite oysters at Shaw's -- I can only imagine how good they must be right out of the water.

Hey, thanks for the axiom!

Isn't that true of all fish and shellfish?

Katie wrote:Isn't that true of all fish and shellfish?

Oysters are alive seconds before consumption; if they're just out of the water, they will likely taste better.

Fish, on the other hand, usually arrive at the market or restaurant dead; they may be fresh and never frozen, but they're dead on arrival.

"Cody Spafford, a sous chef at the restaurant The Walrus and the Carpenter in Ballard, was shot by police on Thursday after he robbed a bank at gunpoint and threatened an officer with a knife"

http://seattletimes.com/html/latestnews ... otxml.html

Fellow oyster lover, here. I can't disagree with the logic, but I'd like to know more about the science because I've never heard the theory before that oysters should have been in bed the day before to taste best. I always figured alive is alive, but you might well have a point. On the other hand, lots of great places in NY and Boston, even, will serve pristine West Coast oysters without a bit of irony, leaving the Blue Points and such to the masses. And probably the best I've ever had were eaten in sunny Nice, though they came from way up north, in Belon. They seemed not to have suffered much from the trip. And, as much as I adore Gulf and Chesapeake oysters, a fist sized, muddy monster plucked from the brackish muck is not going to taste as good, to me, as something from Nova Scotia or Washington, even a few days from the farm. I always figured that the best oyster experiences (and clams, don't forget the clams) come in places like Boston and Seattle and New Orleans because there's an oyster culture with people who know how to handle the bivalves and, due to lower transportation costs, they are relatively cheap and plentiful. They are also somewhat more likely to be fresh, as in still alive when shucked. I'm willing to accept that sitting on ice, even alive, has a negative effect. I couldn't imagine it's positive. Any experts out there?