Dueling bivalves

As oyster reporter in residence, I contacted Aquagrill to find out why some of the oysters I ate there were, well, no so oystery. Some of them lacked the salty briny liquor of the bivalves I know and love.

Jeremy Marshall, Chef owner of Aquagrill was indignant when I asked if his shuckers rinse the oysters once the shells are open. He assured me that that practice was verboten and that the only contact shuckers have with the liquor is to flick out stray sediment with a rubber gloved finger.

How then does he explain my experience of some of his oysters?

Marshall said the intensity and flavor of the liquor depends on where the oysters grew up. He says the water they were raised in has everything to do with their deliciousness, or lack thereof. So, for example, Mashall says west coast oysters and those from Virginia and New Jersey (!) tend to have a flabby or bland taste. And forget about New Orleans. Marshall would never eat those southern creatures on the half shell.

(I loved his use of the word “flabby.” It’s a great way to describe many an oyster I have known.)

The salty, briny, blood-pressure heightening ones, Marshall says, tend to come from Prince Edward Island, Novia Scotia and Alaska. And he said there’s an Alaskan current that makes it’s way down to the waters of Baja rendering oysters from that region particularly briny.

This all got me thinking about the oysters I’ve thrown back at the Acme Oyster Bar in New Orleans. If I’m honest with myself, they weren’t spectacular. They were just fresh and plentiful and the atmosphere is so great, you just end up routing for the little guys.

So that’s some of the skinny on the enigmatic oyster. It’s true that the night I was at Aquagrill, I grooved on the East coast kids. The West coast may take the lead in every Asian and Latin cuisine, but it’s the East that’s said to rock harder when it comes to our hard-shelled friends. I’m going to put the theory to the test and so should you.

It’s a Rao’s miracle!

Friends, I have procured the unprocurable: a reservation at Rao’s! I had no say over the date, time or number of seats, but I’ll be damned if I don’t have a card in my wallet in the handwriting of the reservation guy with all of the salient details.

 

How did this come to pass? How will I be rubbing elbow’s with that special class of New Yorker consisting of highly connected politicos, business folk and “others” who have standing reservations at the mythic Harlem haunt?

My friend Anna Maria read somewhere that if you show up at Rao’s the week of Thanksgiving, you can maybe/possibly/perhaps with much begging, pleading and adorable smiles get a reservation for next year. On Monday, Anna Maria and I walked to the wee eastern edge of Manhattan to see if the rumor was true.

Rao’s
by kidflash

It seemed like pure folly when we headed over there, but when we asked the maitre d’ in the oversized polo shirt about booking a table, he led us to a man who sized us up and led us to a back office filled with stale air from cigarette smoke and the holy grail of the restaurant universe – the Rao’s reservation book. It was old school-big and black and leather bound. He flipped through it and asked us which month we had in mind. I said February. He said, “9:30, on a late February evening for four people” and we said, “OK.” It all happened so fast and Anna Maria and I just thanked him and backed out of the office. I guess we were in shock because in a way, it was kind of, well, easy. There wasn’t any begging to speak of. I did flash a few big smiles, but the truth is that I expected some kind of struggle to make the whole thing more satisfying—and colorful.

We squeezed in at the bar where the only red wine on offer (to us) was a Chianti. After a half hour or so it dawned on me that we had only gotten one reservation. Neither of us minded that we would be eating together but it would have been nice for each of us to have our own rezzie. So I headed back to the reservation room and asked the kind gentleman if we could have just one more reservation. I mentioned that Anna Maria had wanted it for her anniversary but he did not bite. This is how it went down.

“No,” he said. “You can’t come in here expecting to get separate reservations.”

“Yessir,” I said, “but we had never intended to get a reservation together.”

“Look,” he said, now slightly agitated, “I gave you a reservation out of the kindness of my heart. That’s it. No more.”

At this point I noticed I was bent forward with my hands on my knees. He was sitting down and I must have unconsciously tried to lower myself to his level. Weird. The guy in his gentle way was completely intimidating. I have been known, under some circumstances, to have a big and demanding mouth, but not at Rao’s. I was cowed into submission from the start.

Feeling dejected, I went back to the bar and broke the news to Anna Maria. In a way, I guess I had experienced the struggle I had longed for, only it wasn’t that satisfying.

A few minutes later Frankie Pellegrino, the legendary owner, greeted us warmly, like we were one of the special class. If only.

Consider the cider

Yes, I’m in the oyster zone and I haven’t eaten nearly my fill this fall. When I think of perfect oysters past, I’m put in mind of a meal and setting so perfect it will make you want to gag. It was a sunny and windy day in Normandy in the summer of 2001, when 911 was just an emergency code and the franc was still legal tender. One hundred of them – about $15 – would get you a superb prix fixe meal in Paris.

My parents were visiting me and Josh, my then-boyfriend, while we were living in Paris for the summer. After a mesmerizing turn at the Bayeux Tapestry we headed toward the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial on the English Channel by Omaha Beach. We were pretty hungry after examining that gorgeous tapestry so we stopped at a small seaside restaurant right on La Manche.

It sounds cliché, but it does seem like it’s generally the unplanned meals that end up being the ones you can remember decades later, the ones you’ll probably bore your grandkids with. I guess it’s the lack of anticipation or expectation. We sat at a picnic table on a deck right on the water and shared a plate of oysters, two of mussels and a bowl of frites. My mother, who grew up in Belle Harbor, Queens, right at the ocean, was in shellfish heaven. My father, on the other hand, was from Sunnyside, Queens, only a few miles inland but galaxies away when it came to eating raw seafood. Plus, he had grown up in a mostly kosher home (except when his mother snuck in shrimp cocktail for the kids).

Josh and I were stupid with joy and bivalves. The beverage: a dry lightly sparkling hard cider, the kind you can get all over France and Canada. That dry cider was very much a part of the meal and I do believe that it is a most satisfying partner to the oyster.

The Times ran a piece last week on the ice cider trail in Quebec. We’re a little clueless about hard cider south of the border but there is a growing cider movement in the States and Autumn Stoscheck of Eve’s Cidery in Ithaca, New York is one of its pioneers. The 28-year old Stoscheck and her husband make dry and semi-dry hard cider as well as peach-apple wine and apple ice wine. I love the driest, Northern Spy, and that probably comes closest to the Norman cider we drank that summer day in France. The ice wine is a kick. It’s very sweet but has a nice acid backbone that makes you want to taste and taste and taste.

When I spoke to Autumn a few weeks ago, she said she thought that cider was the ideal beverage to drink when cooking. She says it’s refreshing, light and is made from 10% alcohol, a little less than wine. I thought I’d test Autumn’s theory on Friday night. As I cooked lamp chops, curried cauliflower, roasted asparagus and couscous, I opened a bottle of the semi-dry Autumn’s Gold. The cork popped violently and about a quarter of the cider landed on the floor, and counter and me. Once I cleaned up the mess and actually put the stuff in my mouth I thought, Autumn is not wrong. It is delightful to sip cider while cooking. It was even more delightful to sip cider with my friend Miho who came over for dinner.

So I’ve got oysters on the agenda for the next few weeks. I’ll let you know when I check them off my to-do list. Also on the agenda is finding a BYO oyster restaurant so I can bring Autumn’s cider along for the ride.

My kingdom for a Croatian oyster!

On a lark, I tried to recreate my Croatia oyster experience last night at Aquagrill in New York. I was downtown, walking across Spring Street at close to 10pm and thought, oyster season! Aquagrill!

I sat at the bar, ordered a Chablis and asked the server to select six different oysters for me. They were all tasty – the one from Duxbury, Mass. was the sweetest and plumpest – but they did not sing the song of the ancient seas. They were extremely fresh but lacked the brine and saltiness of my Dubrovnik darlings. I wanted more and I think they did, too. I just put in a call to inquire about shucking techniques and whether there is a cleansing process that includes diluting the liquor.

I also ordered the Maine sea urchin. Again, good but not great. It didn’t taste like the rich sea essence is often does at a sushi restaurant. The meat came in its shell perched on ice with a sad little seaweed arrangement. No garnish would have been better. And for some reason, the sauce that accompanied this delicacy – a ponzu with scallions – comes in a large metal gravy boat. It’s definitely on the tacky side and from a practical standpoint, it’s difficult to control the pour and who on earth needs eight tablespoons of sauce for one tiny little urchin? It should come with an eye dropper instead.

Here are some Adriatic urchins off of Cavtat, near Dubrovnik. We saw these spiky guys all over, except on restaurant menus. I’ll have to look into that at some point. Maybe the water is too warm.

The service at Aquagrill was friendly and generous. When a few fruit flies were harassing me, the manager suggested I move further down stream, toward the raw bar. I ended up chatting in French with a lovely oyster shucker from Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso in West Africa. He said he’s never eaten an oyster and that he’s allergic to shellfish. I guess if you don’t know what you’re missing, it’s not so bad to be ensconced in oysters all day, but lord, I would crumple if I ever developed an oyster allergy.

Dubrovnik, at last

Charlotte’s Blackberry serenaded us at about 8am and a few minutes later Dragos called down to say he had left some pastries hanging on our door. Such a sweetheart.

We made our way back to the Hotel Slavija where a shuttle departed for the airport every hour. Just before we left, Eric wandered on. He was hoping to get an earlier flight back to Germany, his layover on the interminable flight to Indonesia. He looked pretty darn together considering he was operating on about three hours sleep. He also had the skinny on further Chip insanity: they had arrived back at their hotel room at about 5am, Chip got into bed at 5:15 and his alarm went off at 5:20. He had to fly to Rome for a business dinner. Eric warned him that five minutes sleep was worse than none at all but the advice fell on deaf, dumb and blind ears.

At the airport, we found out that our flight was delayed two hours. AGHRRRHG! I was so annoyed to have missed out on the sleep but tried to put it behind me. Eric was able to get on an earlier flight and we all settled into the café we had come to consider our own. Then we made the monumental mistake of going through security with Eric. Life on the other side was not pleasant. The duty-free shopping stank and the place was so damned crowded the only spot we could find to sit ourselves down was in some Romper Room chairs. The life-size Leggo Harry Potter was definitely a bonus, however.

Let’s please jump to Montenegro. We landed at the Tivat airport in northern Montenegro. We took a shuttle bus across the bay and then a private taxi across the border because we had just missed the one afternoon bus, which would have been far less expensive.

No one tells you just how complicated it is to cross between Montenegro and Croatia. It’s like, yeah, we know you guys hate each other and yes, Montenegro bombed Dubrovnik less than 10 years ago, and sure, the Croats did some ethnic cleansing in the 90s, but that’s all ancient history to us Americans. Hear this: it’s time to move on because you’re making it a royal pain for tourists to experience both of these wonderful countries.

First off, even though the Tivat airport is only about 30 kilometers from Dubrovnik, there is no direct way of making the journey by public transportion. You can take a shuttle from the airport to a dumpy bus terminal in a town called Herceg Novi, but buses to Dubrovnik from there are sporadic. In fact, we missed the bus by only a few minutes and the next one wasn’t for a couple of hours so we ended up taking a taxi into Dubrovnik for around $60.

Dubrovnik. Where to begin? It’s a glorious walled city on the Adriatic in southern Croatia directly across the sea from Italy’s mid-calf, the Abruzzo region. It was originally built in the 7th century on a nearby Island and was called Ragusa. It was later moved to its current location and was its own citystate for a few hundred years. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage city and it’s freaking awesome. There are fortresses protecting the city from marauders at see, but in the 1990s the city was attacked and a reported 80% of its buildings were damaged. The history is long and complicated. I won’t attempt to explain it here.

We stayed in an apartment located above the old city outside the walls. I think there’s only one place to stay inside. Here we are within a few minutes of our arrival.

We were so tired but it wasn’t hard to hoist ourselves up and wander down to the old city. Cars aren’t allowed inside the city walls and we meandered along the narrow and extremely clean streets and alleyways for a while. The city plan is built like a funnel so when you walk towards the outside walls that sit on the sea, sometimes you’re several stories up.

Not quite in time for sunset we stumbled on a bar that had seating embedded in the rocks on the city’s outer wall. It’s called Busza 2 and it’s the best spot in Dubrovnik for salty service and the sunset.

Photo by Cat Fitzgerald

Photo by Cat Fitzgerald

It was the first time in days we were completely relaxed and the white Croatian wine went down real smooth. After taking in the airs, we made our way back down to the main drag along steep and narrow paths, past stone houses and churches. After much cross-referencing of restaurant reviews, we settled on Kamenice, where we actually had to wait on line, something I’m adamantly opposed to doing in New York because it’s never worth the frustration and humiliation. Not so at Kamenice, where all the seating is outdoors on a square where the farmer’s market is during the day.

We started with oysters and thank the lord we did because these briny and juicy blobs of the sea were unbelievably fresh and delicious. Cat thinks they were the culinary highlight of the trip. They reminded me of how denuded and tasteless oysters often are in the States because of preposterous regulations that sometimes require restaurants to wash the oysters. Unconscionable. Kamenice’s oysters were heaven in a shell.

Next we split three dishes: a squid ink risotto, mussels in wine and langoustine bouzara. The risotto was unexceptional but the mussels and langoustine were stellar. I had never heard of bouzara before but it was on the menu in all the coastal towns we visited. The primary ingredients are tomato, onion and oodles of garlic. The mussels were small but sweet and the langoustines quickly made it to one of my top five meals. Also called scampi, Norway lobster and Dublin Bay scampi, langoustines look like baby lobsters and some say crayfish but apparently the two are not related and you can’t even compare the taste. The taste of langoustine lies somewhere between lobster and shrimp and the texture is like crab. At Kamenice, they were SUBLIME. Sweet, fragrant and they stood up to the strong sauce – although they would have been equally as dreamy just grilled with a little lemon.

Photo by Cat Fitzgerald

I haven’t eaten many langoustines in my day, and the only time in recent memory was at the very up-market L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in New York City, where they were wrapped in a filo-like pastry called brick. Those were very good. Kamince’s were exceptional.

Full and sleepy, we wended our way out of the old town (after stopping off for some gelato), up the half mile of stairs to the apartment.