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.
On a good night, Hollywood and his band of fellow shuckers open 1,000 oysters apiece, maybe a few more. Come New Year's Eve or Mardi Gras, the number reaches 2,000. But after all these years—and all those oysters—the mechanics are rote, the shell count unimportant.
Even among shuckers who consider themselves to be as good or better, Hollywood has earned a grudging respect. He's the shucker that other restaurant owners turn to when they're scouting for new talent. He's the man to call when you want to hire a crew for a private party. And this past fall, in concert with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, he began teaching shucker certification classes at Nicholls State University, in nearby Thibodaux. Hollywood's coworkers were quick to dub the enterprise Shuck U, eliding the first syllable in a blatant effort to exploit the double entendre.
And now, the jive:
"When I was little, my mama used to tell me that I talked too much," says Thomas Stewart, the opener at Pascal's Manale, a 1913-vintage, Italian-Creole restaurant set on an Uptown side street. "She was right. I do like to talk. The thing is, I found a way to make a living at it."
Thomas works alone at a sloping, white marble bar in the front room, just inside the door. The wall behind him is plastered with black-and-white photographs of prizefighters. Above hang wagon-wheel chandeliers.
Twelve years into his tenure, Thomas has worked his way up from dishwasher to chief shucker. "When I started out, there was no one to show me how," he says, scooping a pail of cubed iced into the bar bin. "So I just snatched a few oysters and a butter knife and sat down on a slop bucket to teach myself. Now I'm the man. The "I-Pop-'Em-Until-You-Drop-'Em Man." A violent swivel and bump of the hips accent this last linguistic flourish.
If Hollywood is, at heart, a steely-eyed technician, then Thomas is his alter ego, with a style best described as an amalgam of the flamboyance of Little Richard and the zealotry of Ron Popeil. He is also handy with a knife. "I don't believe in serving chippies," says the 39-year-old. "No chipped shells. My hustle is my hands. Without a good set of hands, I'm nobody." But that's not what keeps his regulars coming back.
On a recent Friday night, as the cocktail hour gives way to dinner, the crowd at Pascal's Manale turns as thick and boisterous as a rugby scrum. Orders for oysters pour in, dozen upon dozen upon dozen. Just when Thomas is on the verge of losing it, he hits a groove. His knife work slows, his voice drops a register. And he goes skittering back and forth across the duckboards, trading jibes here, slinging shucked platters there. When he catches sight of a regular leaning in close, waving a ten-spot, Thomas stops dead in his tracks, tosses an imaginary cape across his shoulders, and leaps for the bill, calling out in his best imitation of Mighty Mouse, "Here I come to save the day!" His voice rings clarion, a basso profundo worthy of an opera star weaned on cartoons.
At a little before eight, a young couple walks in. The boy makes a beeline for the bar, but the girl hangs back. She looks anxious. The boy orders a dozen. "I got big ole good-uns and good ole big-uns," says Thomas. "Which you gonna have?" The girl cracks the barest of smiles and sidles up alongside her date. The boy introduces himself. "Howdy, chief," replies Thomas. "What's slappin', captain?" And then he attempts to answer his own question in a singsong rap: "Ain't nothing shakin' but the eggs and the bacon and the beans on the grill. Ain't nothing shakin' but the peas in the pot till the water get hot."
"Better make that two dozen," allows the boy. Thomas fishes the first oyster from the bin and plunges his knife in to the hilt. "If I can get 'em smiling," he says to no one in particular, "I can get 'em swallowing."
Acme Oyster House
724 Iberville Street
504-522-5973
Pascal's Manale
1838 Napoleon Avenue
504-895-4877
Chef's Secret
From Michael "Hollywood" Broadway: To be sure that an oyster is alive and well before it's shucked, tap the shell with an oyster knife—a hollow report means the creature inside is dead and should be discarded.