Life, death and the new year at Jax Fish House & Oyster Bar

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A bucket filled with ice-cold oysters sits on the bar at Jax Fish House & Oyster Bar. While Shaun Mitchell, one of the restaurant’s shuckers, sets up his space, I tentatively pick up a bulbous, unattractive oyster with a rocklike texture. Despite having just been flown in that morning, this oyster and its siblings have the feel of prehistoric objects.

Flecks of dirt and sand transfer to my hands as I examine the mollusk. A tiny black seashell is attached to it.

“That’s just a barnacle,” Mitchell tells me as I twist it free.

I ask Mitchell if the oyster in my hands is alive, and he explains that it is — it dies when it’s shucked (when the shell is opened with a knife). Throughout my visit, statements such as this slowly eradicate the romance of these precious sea creatures.

Then again, they’re why I’m here. In the spirit of celebration — as I, along with masses of other seafood enthusiasts, prepare to gorge ourselves on the traditional New Year’s Eve morsel — I’ve asked Mitchell to give me an oyster-shucking tutorial. First, though, I must know what I’m handling.

“At Jax, we have two main types of oysters: West Coast and East Coast,” Mitchell says. “With most West Coast oysters, you can kind of tell them by their shell shape — they kind of have this fluted shape to them.

“You’ve got an East Coast oyster,” he tells me, gesturing to the hunk warming in my palm. “Usually the East Coast are a bit more rounded.”

There are hundreds of species of oysters, he says, and Jax’s selection is an ever-rotating representation from both coasts.

“Most of the West Coast that we get are either from British Columbia or Washington,” he says. “With East Coast, it’s Massachusetts, Virginia and Maine, and sometimes it’s New York, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick — kind of all over the place with East Coast.”

Typically, Mitchell says, West Coast oysters are characterized by their creaminess and East Coast by their oceanic, salty profile. At this point, Mitchell can usually recognize the species by taste: Jax’s Rainier jumbo-sized oysters, from Washington, have grassy, buttery notes; the small Deer Creek oysters, also from Washington, have a cucumber finish.

The Rainier oysters can be particularly difficult to shuck, Mitchell says. He plucks one from the pile.

“Usually, the Rainiers we get are much bigger than this,” he says, tossing the tennis-ball–size puck from one hand to the other. “We’ve broken many shuck knives on those big guys.”

Mitchell invites me behind the bar to shuck my own oyster. He hands me a medium-size Emersum — Jax’s proprietary oyster, sourced from the Chesapeake Bay. The safest way to shuck, he says, is to fold a towel into a square and place the shell between the folds. My left hand goes on top of the towel covering my victim; my right hand grips the shucking knife, a short blade with a curved tip.

“Every oyster has an opening where normally it would hinge,” Mitchell says. “So you kind of just take the knife and wiggle it in there, and it kind of pops open.”

I watch Mitchell’s example, then turn to my own little guy. Where Mitchell made it look easy, I struggle to find the right spot for my knife. Once it’s in, I shimmy the knife until I hear a breathy pop: the sound of death.

“Is it dead?” I ask Mitchell. “Did I kill it?”

“Yes,” he tells me, unshaken, and continues with his instructions. I take the knife and run it along the bottom of the oyster, disconnecting the meat from the shell and flipping it over so that the plump, glistening belly stares up at me.

“It looks better to people when you flip it,” Mitchell says. “You get that meatiness on the other side.”

I’m torn between my guilt for the oyster that has just been sacrificed and the thrill of killing something with my bare hands, even if it was a tiny invertebrate. I ask Mitchell if he ever considers the great responsibility that comes with his job. He laughs and says he doesn’t think about it.

“They had a noble cause,” he says, placing my Emersum alongside several of its fallen relatives on a tray filled with ice. I spoon a bit of Jax’s mignonette sauce onto an oyster and slurp it from the shell. Brine, vinegar, a hint of sea salt — I ingest it all in one splendid moment. (My guilt is assuaged.)

Jax’s general manager, Rick Compton, expects to go through quite a few Emersums on New Year’s Eve, when the restaurant offers its full menu in addition to several specials. Oysters, he says, naturally complement the holiday’s most popular beverage, champagne.

“Oysters have properties that make people feel really good when they’re eating them,” Compton says. “There’s a mental process to that, feeling like you just did something really primal and got connected to your food in a way that you haven’t before or don’t usually get to do. And then, chemically, there’s also things that are happening in your body when you eat an oyster. They’re loaded in B vitamins and zinc and clean protein.

“So those things have always made for a heightened state of digestion, which kind of turns people on — you know, there’s that aphrodisiac association, which I think comes from eating something so alive and so fresh, loaded in vitamins that make you feel great,” he continues. “When you pair that with something like champagne, where the acid and the fruit will go well with either the creaminess or the brininess of an oyster, and which is also a special-occasion thing, it’s just magic.”

Oh, and don’t forget the champagne.

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