Haresh Shah
How I Came To Like / No, Love Oysters?
I have had a long day. Up at 4:30 in the morning, I take a quick shower and get into my Buick and zoom through the Mittlerer Ring and rush to Munich’s Riem International Airport. Catch the first flight to Düsseldorf. Pick up a rental car and race to Essen. Heinz (Nellissen) and I work through the day, do it non-stop through the lunch and don’t even get around to grab their delicious Fricadel and Brötchen with mustard from the company canteen. I need to leave promptly at five and rush back to the airport and catch the last Paris bound flight. Hungry as I am, I skip the anemic looking cold cuts served onboard. We’re having dinner at La Coupole.
Brasserie La Coupole on boulevard du Montparnasse is a Paris landmark like no other. It is the quintessential symbol of Montparnasse’s history as well as the art of living and socializing in Paris. And is hailed as the temple of art deco. I have never been there before and am very much looking forward to this evening.
I check in at the George V and after a hurried shower, hail a cab and arrive at Le Coupole at little after nine. There are about eight of Playboy people sitting at sidewalk tables pulled together. Waiting on the tables are ice buckets filled with chilling bottles of Chablis and Sancerre, large platters of shucked oysters placed on the bed of ice, their wet and slimy surfaces shivering and still pulsating with life surrounded by the wedges of lemon strewn in-between the oyster shells. The tables are littered with little plates and the bread crumbs that continue do drop at every tear of the crust.
This is Playboy Foreign Edition’s second international meeting. Its small and intimate with only four countries onboard. Over the years, it would mushroom into an annual, one most important event that brought together Playboy families from around the world. The French and the German crowd is already there. We’re still waiting for the Italians and the Americans to arrive. While everyone else is wine happy and feasting on the freshest and the most delicious oysters – I am guessing, because I have never tasted an oyster in my entire life. Just the look of them give me creeps, yikes!! Their slimy slippery wetness looking like devil’s eyes makes me nauseous. And they are still alive!! Couldn’t even imagine actively picking one up, let alone putting one in my mouth and slurping it in, chewing or washing it down with a gulp of wine and really enjoying it, as everyone around the tables seems to be doing.
But I am beyond starving. I am famished and feeling physically weak at lack of sleep and with the day like I have had, I am feeling run down. You can eat only so much bread and drink so much wine on an empty stomach. A hefty piece of steak-au-poire avec pommes would be great. But I can’t just go ahead and order it while we are still waiting for the rest – among them my own bosses – who I understand are just checking into the hotel. So it probably would be another hour or so before they really make it to the restaurant. In the meanwhile, those present are greedily slurping down oyster after oyster, tearing off pieces of bread and washing them down with the excellent wine. The consumed bottles are taken away and replaced by more, the ice in the buckets replenished and the large aluminum platters filled with oysters keep sliding in and out of their stands like frisbees. All those live vibrating lumps shoved down the palates in easy gulps.
While I hear my stomach growl, I feel a buzz in my head. I watch people still picking up oysters from the platters, squeezing the lemon wedges over them, picking up the shell, putting it halfway through their mouths and slurp up the meat.
To distract my thoughts from my intensifying hunger, I think of the legend that La Coupole has become. Since it opened its doors just before Christmas in 1927, forty five years before, attended by 2500 guests – 1200 bottles of champagne were popped open. Since then it has become the stomping ground for artists and writers, musicians and singers that include Picasso and Matisse. I imagine Josephine Baker at an inside table dining with Simenon. Jean-Paul Sartre holding court at his table # 149 with Simone de Beauvoir listening adoringly. I am imagining Henry Miller to stride in at any moment and charm a meal and a bottle or two of vintage wine out of some sucker for his sheer brilliance and then walk out with his lady friend hanging on his arm. And I would certainly get up and shake hands with Albert Camus, whose existential novels were all the rage ten years earlier among us young and inspiring writers in India. And wouldn’t it be awesome if Serge Gainsbourg were to walk in with gorgeous Jane Birkin, making his trademark flamboyant entrance, to whose J’taime us disco set danced night after night?
‘Come on, try one. They’re so delicious!’ Prods, I no longer remember who, but one of our French editors who I’ll call Rémy. I am rudely awakened from my reveries and brought back to the reality of my poor growling stomach.
‘I can’t!’
‘Why can’t you?’
‘Because…’
‘Because what? How can you be in France, sitting at La Coupole and not taste our own huiters de Normandie? They are probably harvested this very morning, you know? Normandy yields some of the world’s best oysters. Hell, we have the best oysters in the world.’ I see Rémy’s face beaming. True French pride. ‘And after a long summer, the oyster season has just began and this year they are particularly incredibly good!’
‘May be so, but I don’t know, just look at them!’
Someone who grew up being a vegetarian in whose family even eggs were considered meat, I have come a long way. Up until I was twenty five, I have never had eaten any meat dishes. During my two and half years in London, I may have ventured in to taste chicken curry a few times and may have managed to swallow a few pieces of meat placed in front of me, just not to offend those kind hearted host families in England and in Holland – where I interned during my summer and winter breaks. But it wasn’t until after I graduated and landed a job with Burda in Offenburg while living with a German family did I begin to eat meat in earnest. Even so, I had hardest time eating any seafood. The most I had managed over the interim four years in the States, was to acquire taste for fried shrimps and broiled lobster tails. Couldn’t deal with any of the fish at all. I did try escargot once. Baked inside their little shells and swimming in the garlic butter. I was able to swallow half a dozen yucky looking black curled up creatures, only because I nudged them down with the garlic butter soaked piece of bread and with my eyes closed, and a glass of wine at ready. But oysters?
‘I’m looking at them. But they are meant to be eaten, unless you’re looking for pearls,’
‘Pearls?’
‘Yeah. Didn’t you know that the most beautiful pearls are found inside certain types of oysters?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Of course. But never mind. Just try one. I promise you would like it.’
‘But Rémy!’
‘These are so delicious! And they taste and feel just like, you know?’ Rémy has this knowing look on his face as if I knew what he’s talking about. Realizing that maybe I really didn’t know what he was leading to, he elaborates.
‘Just like, you know? Woman’s sex. How do you call it?’
‘You mean pussy?’
‘Oui alors, exactement!’
This conjures up an image of a photograph I had seen some place. Perhaps in an old issue of Playboy even, featuring aphrodisiacs and erotic food as displayed on different parts of the female anatomy. The one with oysters has a close up of a shapely woman’s pelvic region from the waist down to her upper thighs. Arranged like the bird’s nest in a diamond shape is fresh mesclun lettuce, that hides and at the same time enhances her pubic areas by giving them the fall colors, rusty red on the fringe of wild green leaves, the edges of the leaves simulating the curls of thickly concentrated pubic hair. Three shucked dark shelled oysters are placed at the each corner of the lettuce – raw, moist, succulent, tender and glistening. A tantalizing image even for those of us who shudder at the thought of eating one of those.
I look back at Rémy and smirk, still with I don’t know expression on my face.
‘Come on, try one or two. I’ll help you’ And even before I have time to say anything, Rémy has picked up an oyster from the platter. In his other hand is a little baby fork, with which he expertly and gently dislodges and tugs the oyster out of its shell and is holding it in front of my mouth. Seeing I am still hesitant, he asks me to close my eyes and open my mouth.
It feels on my tongue like a lump of slimy moss. I feel something moving over my tongue on its own and I’m about to throw up. Instead, I swiftly pick up my wine glass and take a big swallow and the first oyster of my life is on its way down crawling through my system. I pick up and break a piece of bread and then wash it down with another gulp of wine. Rémy’s eyes are riveted on me.
‘See, it wasn’t too bad, was it? Let’s try one more time.’ Doesn’t he see the tears rolling down my eyes? Even if he does, he is incorrigible. He yanks out another oyster and down it goes.
‘Now try it yourself!’ Still feeling squeamish, I mimic the ritual of first squeezing the lemon, holding the oyster in my left hand and pulling it out with the little fork and slowly lift the lumpy little slime and catch it between my lips, let it linger on my tongue, feel and taste the freshly squeezed lemon juice, even chew it a little bit, and let it slide down on its own. And I try the another one, and yet another one.
Delicieux.
© Haresh Shah 2013
Illustration: Celia Rose Marks
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