Life & Society
Class conscious - Andrew Martin tracks the upwardly mobile oyster
Published 24 May 2004
When oysters arrive at table, it's like being presented with a trophy
The local Loch Fyne restaurant, outside which Gordon Brown and John Prescott supposedly plotted in Argyll, was very busy. But the one that I walked into alone last week was two-thirds empty. "Nothing for you right now, sir," said the manager. "Come back in half an hour."
Half an hour later, the restaurant was four-fifths empty. "I think we can now squeeze you in," said the manager, frowning over his list of bookings (which was completely blank, as far as I could see). I suppose he had been hoping not to incur the loss of revenue involved in giving a table for two to a single diner, and I ought to have punished him by ordering a single oyster, which you can do at these restaurants. It costs £1.25, and comes on a mountain of ice with vinaigrette, Worcester sauce, lemon, salt and pepper. As it was, I ordered six.
When oysters arrive, it's like being presented with a trophy, especially at la Coupole in Paris, where it takes three waiters to serve six of them. Yet, up until about 80 years ago - before the exhaustion of our oyster beds, and pollution blight - they were the street-corner finger food of the working class, which is why the association of Prescott with oysters is so resonant.
"It's a wery remarkable circumstance," says Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers, "that poverty and oysters always seems to go together." There used to be an oyster vendor on every street corner in Blackpool; now, there are four places in the town where you can buy oysters, and the going rate for a takeaway oyster is £2.50. Zingy and fresh as they are, that's a lot for one mouthful, and you don't even get to chew, the correct technique for eating an oyster being the precise opposite of hawking up phlegm.
The last remnant of the old days is Robert's Oyster Bar, on the north end of the Prom. This used to be a sit-down place, but the current owner, Warren Ormerod, has regretfully had to turn it into a seafood stall until such time as demand picks up. "Even ten years ago, the place was selling three to four thousand oysters a week. Now it's a fraction of that," he said. I asked him to characterise the typical oyster buyer, and he said: "Old."
I saw more oysters at a party given at a Georgian house in Kennington, south London, earlier this year than I have done in the past five years of going to the seaside. Here, a man was teaching my eight-year-old son to open oysters with an oyster knife, and I felt as I do when I watch my son at his fencing lessons where, despite the glamorous, vaguely Frenchified context, I always want to exclaim: "You'll have somebody's eye out with that bloody thing!"
You open an oyster by holding the sharp end - the prow, so to speak - towards you, and introducing the knife at a position that accords with ten past two. Or is it ten to ten? There's so much lore associated with seafood. Are you supposed to eat oysters only when there's an "r" in the month, or only when there isn't? Somebody said: "It was a brave man that ate the first oyster", and I like to think that I'm quite brave in putting away tonnes of seafood while knowing damned all about it. I mean . . . you hear about people who eat "a bad oyster" and it affects the rest of their life, like a serious motorcycle crash.
Oh, and when you have bouillabaisse, lobster bisque and croutons, what do you do? Drop the rouille directly into the soup, or float it on the croutons, and if so, why? It all adds to the social mystery and racy glamour of seafood, and of fishmongers, who are far less craven than most shopkeepers. They're a law unto themselves, wearing white wellington boots, talking to you over their shoulder while slicing up dangerous-looking eels and often, I've noticed, closing at one o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. Is this because the fish is losing its freshness by then? Or so they can go and watch the football?
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