2000s Archive

Half-Shell Boogie

Originally Published October 2001
The shuck and jive of New Orleans oyster openers has the beauty of music. John T. Edge watches the hustle of the hands and captures their syncopated rhythms.

The oysters tasted of the salt and the sea, soft waves crashing over my tongue and down my gullet. By all rights, this should have been a culinary epiphany in the making. But I couldn't take my eyes off the shuckers long enough to truly concentrate on the gustatory experience itself. I was enthralled by the glint of their knives flashing in the gilt-edged mirror hung behind the bar, by the ease with which they pried open the rough shells and extracted the sweet, silvery morsels.

I was, of course, in New Orleans, where the art of shucking is celebrated as a sacrament. In this city, rife with buskers and grifters, hustlers and hawkers, the accomplished opener of oysters is held in particularly high regard, recognized as the inheritor of a storied tradition that began with eastern European immigrants and 19th-century Creoles of color who operated jury-rigged stands along the river levee near Picayune Pier. These pioneers peddled bivalves by the gunnysack, cracking open a dozen at a time for anyone with a few coins jingling in their pocket.

There's always been some debate as to what constitutes a shucker. Old-school oystermen will tell you that a shucker is the man or woman who plies their trade at one of the city's wholesale houses, like Captain Pete's or P & J. Their yield goes into quart jars bound for grocery stores and, eventually, gumbos and po' boys.

An opener, on the other hand, is the man—rarely, if ever, do you see a woman—who works a raw bar in a restaurant or tavern, serving oysters on the half shell to be slurped up then and there. Today, however, the distinctions are blurred, and shucker is the almost universal appellation of choice.

Such quibbling aside, few would deny that the littoral of New Orleans is where the art of oyster opening can be observed at its zenith, where quicksilver speed, surgical precision, and randy banter converge and complement. For it is here, in dank French Quarter barrooms and dowdy Uptown emporiums, that the two great traditions of shucking and jiving fuse and reach fullest flower.

First, the shuck:

Michael Broadway, age 42 and a veteran of more than 25 years behind the bar, is the senior opener at the boisterous, neon-gilded Acme Oyster House on Iberville Street in the French Quarter. His friends and customers know him as Hollywood. Acme, in business since 1910, is the highest-volume oyster house in the city, the spot where oyster-eating contests are decided, where generation after generation of locals and tourists alike were first introduced to the bracing taste of these briny mollusks. And make no mistake: Hollywood is king of the middens.

"They call me Slow But Good Hollywood," he says, a shy smile spreading across his thin face. True to his moniker, he is a student of technique and yield, unconcerned for the most part with speed. "It's as important to cut a clean oyster as it is to cut it quick," Hollywood says. "I can go fast if I want to, but I'd rather go steady and clean."

He snags a mottled gray shell from one of the white tile bins piled high with chipped ice. In his right hand is a short knife with a plastic handle. If it weren't so dull, it would resemble a dagger. He taps once with the knife to "wake that oyster up, let him know I'm coming in to get him." He also listens for a telltale hollow report, which would mean the creature within is dead and shriveled.

Failing that, Hollywood tucks the shell against the lip of the bar, wedging it firmly in place with his gloved left hand. Others steady the oyster with a lead pallet shaped like a truncated trough, but Hollywood prefers the sure grip of his hand.

He leans into the oyster, ratcheting his body weight down like a vise. The knife comes in from the top right, aimed not for the narrow hinge but for the wide end of the shell, seeking purchase in a crook or cranny. "That's how you tell the boys from the men," says Hollywood. "The men take it in through the front door." With a grating screech, the knife skips along the seam of the shell, and then slips in the side.

Hollywood pulls the knife back toward his body, twisting as he goes. The shell pops open with a gurgle that is at once mechanical and nautical, something akin to what it must sound like to open a submerged treasure chest.

For the briefest of moments, the oyster is suspended between the two halves of the shell, tethered by the bone-white abductor muscle near the center. Two quick chops of the knife and the quivering gray mass is free of its mooring. Not a trace of the meat remains attached to the shell.

"One last thing—you got to clean that oyster up before you're done," says Hollywood, as he draws his knife alongside the meat, pushing aside a thin effluvium of silt. Maybe 70 seconds after he began, he slides the oyster onto the marble bar, taking care to tip the wide end of the shell up, reserving the precious liquor.

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