The Road to Wellfleet

ELLFLEET, MASSACHUSETTS, located near the tip of Cape Cod, is the namesake of a particularly fine specimen of oyster, and the home of an annual festival celebrating the same. According to the website of the Wellfleet OysterFest, “Wellfleet oysters have been considered some of the world’s best for generations. The Wellfleet oyster is an eastern oyster, crassostrea virginica by species, the same kind of oyster that grows in Long Island Sound, as far south as the Chesapeake Bay, and up into Canada’s Maritime Provinces in the north.”

Not being a WASP, or all that much of a beach person, I’d never heard of Wellfleet until recently; my knowledge of Cape Cod was limited to a handful of Teddy Kennedy obituaries and a night spent in Hyannis during a blizzard last year. The good news is that I was introduced to Wellfleet by two friends who needed to fill an unexpected vacancy in the cottage they’d rented for the oyster festival. I cleared my desperately busy schedule, bought a New England-style blue and yellow raincoat, and struck out for the only place whiter than Plymouth Rock.

A few posts from now I intend to address the fact that the main themes of this blog—poverty, hardship, and whining—are often nowhere to be found in the actual foods and activities depicted herein. In the present case, I’ll just have to say that I have some very generous friends and leave it at that. I have those friends to thank for this oyster stew, one of the most alarmingly satisfying cups of food I’ve ever eaten. The line for this stuff extended literally down the length of Wellfleet’s main street.

My intention was to take as many photos as possible of the cooks’ preparations, that we might be able to reproduce the stew when we got home. Alas, their hands moved pretty fast, and I was hopelessly distracted from my task by the smells their cauldrons were kicking up.

I’m not sure if this guy is the celebrated “Chopper,” whose name adorns that truncated sign, or one of his colleagues, but in any case I suspect he is a world-class shucker. He’s so grizzled that he even smokes his cigarette in that grizzled-dude way. He could probably open a gross of oysters with his driver’s license before you even got the knife drawer open.

There were also clams—and nautical kitsch—in abundance.

This man was a talented shucker of quahogs. Unfortunately, he also happened to be wearing New England Patriots-themed dreadlocks and is obviously a Red Sox fan. All I’m saying is, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if he got his hands caught in some kind of machinery.

More oysters. Smell that brine, y’all.

Once more, with cocktail sauce. I’m not a huge fan of Sam Adams, but it seemed like the thing to do at the time.

Mussels—to round out the Holy Trinity of bivalves.

This last photograph was taken at Wellfleet’s imaginatively named Bookstore & Restaurant. I’m in no position to attest to the overall quality of the restaurant, though the clams (and franks) were just fine, but the bookstore is incredible. A wealth of old postcards, magazines, mystery novels, and so on will make you feel like you’re in the attic of the weirdest grandma in history. Do not visit Wellfleet without dropping a few bucks at this joint.