The Oyster Bar
November in the city is a time for reflection. While the air is abuzz with holiday preparations, there is also an implicit resignation that the year is coming to an end, along with all your grand plans. There are days of lingering warmth and sunshine, peppered with biting winds and flurries, warning of the months to come like dogs barking at the gate.
Gone are the sidewalk cafés where I idle between appointments. Come November, I seek the shelter of familiar haunts. I often travel through Grand Central Station and stop at The Oyster Bar. I take a seat at the long spiraling counter and scan the multitude. Their faces glow under incandescent bulbs magnified by tile-vaulted ceilings. I order a Manhattan clam chowder, an iced tea or white wine depending on the time of day, and 3 oysters. Sometimes I skip the soup and get a half a dozen oysters. I always do the crossword puzzle. It’s a ritual that even after thirteen years of living in the city, makes me feel like an actor playing at being a New Yorker.
As I pick at the ubiquitous everything-crusted flat bread and puzzle over the answer to 27 down, “energy, informally,” I start to imagine some past version of myself doing the same thing a half a century before. I see her gloved hands and matching handbag. I hear the sigh she lets escape as she finally takes a seat and removes her coat. In her moment’s respite, I wonder if she thinks of me. Not me, me but some future version of herself doing the same thing in this grand intersection of travelers.
My order arrives with little fanfare. I dress the oysters with lemon and Tabasco. I shut my eyes as we are wont to do with first bites. The cold, creamy shot of umami slivers down my throat, and in a flash, I’m flooded with warmth; a vision of over-exposed waves and the crackle of filtered laughter. My eyes flutter open, and there in that vaulted, Edwardian hall, I begin to feel all the versions of the woman who sat here before, and even those who will sit here again. All the women catching trains, knocking on doors, offering pieces of herself, and crossing off dreams like so many clues on a page.
It makes sense. After all, the oyster is one of the only things we eat that is still alive. It carries in its flesh a sweet, vast ocean along with a civilization’s refuse and regret. Recently, I shucked an oyster at home and inside there was a sand crab exploding with roe. Maybe that’s why I like them. Eating them is a sort of through line, a continuity between then, and now, and what is yet to come.
Find the recipe inspired by the tale HERE.
