Dollar Oysters
Great meals begin with a series of separations: removing a plant or animal from its home, ending its life, portioning it, removing blood and bone or pith and root, the separation of flesh from itself with a sharp, quick, knife before your teeth apply the last and final division of the bite.
For a lot of seafood these separations are trivial. Farmed fish, frozen or tinned, is fine. But for the very best fish, the separation is rough and rapid. A person must go out on the water, find a strong animal that has lived a full life, and get it out of the water and onto your plate as quickly as possible. That means the best place for fish is not the panoramic coastal restaurant with the leather, arm-length menu and the deferent servers who suggest wine pairings. It is the shack by the dock with the wooden sign, manned by coarse-handed workers, that cuts and divides what the ocean gave them.
Even that close to the source, such fish come at a steep cost. World-class seafood joints are the only places where someone in a baseball cap can serve you a meal on a paper plate and charge you eighty bucks for it. There’s no trim here, no tablecloths, no maitre’d, and the prices still make your bile rise. You’d think it would relegate great seafood to a rare splurge at best. Unless you build a life around living in a coastal town, throw the lines out yourself, such food is beyond mere mortals’ grasp.
That all changes on Tuesday night. At Woodhouse Fish, Tuesday is dollar oyster night.
Nothing makes me feel as wealthy as sharing an unending supply of great food on tiny plates. A decent tapas place can fulfill this fantasy, but requires taking out a second mortgage to do so. Oysters, each serving as its own little plate, are equally perfect but rarely affordable. Here in San Francisco, $1 buys you nothing. Not coffee, not parking, certainly not real actual food. But at Woodhouse, on Tuesdays only, it buys you a fantastic oyster.
You cannot have just one oyster. Dollar oysters must be consumed by the platter. A shy diner might start with six to share, then follow with a dozen, then perhaps a dozen more, but a veteran knows to just come out the gate with an 18 rack and get to work. The oysters must be paired with a crunchy starch (fries are fine, the bread is a little overpriced and plain) and, if it's on the menu, the squid ink linguini. This meal, a beer, and good company can redeem the most abysmal day.
I found Woodhouse the summer I needed it most. That May, my wife and I agreed on a trial separation. The year prior had been fraught with mutual pain. It was hard on both of us, but I was less able to advocate for myself than she was. A constant sense of helplessness and failure had left me a physical and psychological wreck. During my marriage I put on twenty five pounds of muscle, muscles that increasingly wracked my body with tension as I stumbled forward. Towards the end, every day I wore a gray coat, a button down shirt, jeans, and the one pair of shoes I could safely walk in without experiencing debilitating back pain. Every day I attempted to endure, grow, change, negotiate, forge a way forward in the darkness. Every day the darkness won.
After we separated, I took four weeks off work to recover. Most of this time I spent laying on the floor or sitting and staring into the mirror. I felt the chair under my hips, held my heart, looked myself in the eye. These lungs that had breathed in and held my breath for so long, what did they need to breathe out? The legs and back that I had trained to lift three hundred pounds at the gym, that swelled and warped my posture to cause so much pain, what emotions were they holding on to? What weren’t they telling me, for fear of destroying my sense of self? I laid hands and eyes on each part of my body, listened without judgment, and over time I began to recover. I started re-learning how to walk. I started re-learning how to feel.
During this time, I made a decision. That summer, my stomach was the boss. No morals, no ideas, no duties, no obligation to be a husband or a son or a manager or any of the other things I aspired to be, just me listening to my body. I spent weeks learning to hear what my stomach said. I massaged, did yoga, meditated, took therapy. And eventually, my stomach told me loud and clear what to do: eat good food with friends.
So I did. Three, four, five times a week, I would go out with a friend and we would eat phenomenal food together. On Tuesdays, invariably that meant Woodhouse. I would drink my lager, Roy or Edmund or Drew or Melanie would mix up their Arnold Palmer or sip their water, we would discuss how many oysters to order, and we would put them away. We were kings. We had won. For once, I had a goal that I could absolutely, unequivocally dominate, and I did, over and over. Meanwhile, I found clothes that not only looked great on me, but were incredibly comfortable. I bought a hat to match. I found shoes that neither tipped my body into old habits of self-betrayal, nor looked like a medical device. I wore these clothes to Woodhouse Fish, and I looked great and talked quickly with people that I loved, never tiring, never full.
The outside of an oyster is tough and brittle. From the day they are born, they build a shell, and they live their whole lives stuck in that shell. They move around for a while, then settle somewhere and calcify. The inside of an oyster stays soft and strong. It is alive. It moves water in and out, it cleans itself, it draws in food. It flexes and releases.
I was searching for my own soft part. Every time I squeezed a lemon, dabbed cocktail sauce and horseradish, prodded with that silly little fork, and took in an oyster with a briney slurp, I was hoping that it would nudge my body one tiny step towards feeling like home again. I didn't know where I was going, didn't know who I would become, but wherever I ended up, I wanted to be able to laugh in astonishment at a table like this, with friends like these, with a shell split fully open.
On a Tuesday night in San Francisco, one dollar can buy you a glimpse of who you can be, who your stomach hopes you will be. One dollar, an open mouth, and time for an early dinner with someone who reminds you how it feels to love the air you're breathing, love the concrete under your feet, love even your baffled stumbling as a barrage of memories sabotages your evening walk, love even your slow acceptance of your own failure to adapt and be the partner you promised you'd be, love even the broken, unhelpful, silent-mouthed stranger in the mirror who took your marriage and health, love him and hold his hand as you swallow another and another of these strange, still-living creatures with and without sauce, with and without feeling, with and without a single trace of the man you tried so hard to be, until the sun goes down and the fog holds you close and you can say, yes, this too is a life I will live.
