By Nicholas Andre
The summer is horrible. Your friends are all away on vacation and you’re stuck sweating your brains out in a stuffy New Jersey living room. But perhaps far worse is trying to makes plans for a sit-down dinner. Between vacations and spur-of-the-moment plans, it’s almost impossible to get whole gang together on one evening. However, when I turned 16 in the summer of 2008, a miracle occurred. My whole family gathered for a dinner at a fine restaurant for my birthday. For all the bad parts about having a birthday in the summer, there is one thing that the season does extremely well: seafood.
We went to Oaklands Restaurant in Hampton Bays, which overlooks the Shinnecock Bay on Long Island. We pulled into the parking lot right as the sun was starting to set. A gentle breeze blew. Needless to say, I couldn’t order my usual cheeseburger here. The setting just didn’t match that kind of meal.
I never classified myself a fan of seafood. I ate the occasional flounder, cooked rather blandly, and had my fair share of cocktail shrimp at fancy dinner parties. Neither compare to this restaurant’s dishes.
“The slimy shelled creatures resembled snot and smelled like they were rotting. Oysters were far from my comfort zone, but my father insisted.”
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying this was the best meal I’ve ever had. Not by a long shot. But for someone who never before had a proper seafood meal, I can only compare this to what a child must feel like the first time he or she tastes a piece of candy. I simply didn’t know seafood could be this good.I looked over the menu with wide eyes. What I thought I knew about seafood came from watching the Food Network. Whether by chance or luck, I ended up ordering a tuna steak. My father informed me that the only proper way to order that dish was to get it cooked rare, and so I did.
But before I could enjoy my meal, my father planned a little surprise in the form of an appetizer. Knowing how fresh the seafood was, he ordered raw oysters for us to share. Absolutely nothing about the oysters appealed to me. The slimy shelled creatures resembled snot and smelled like they were rotting. Oysters were far from my comfort zone, but my father insisted.
To say I enjoyed raw oysters wouldn’t be entirely true, but it’s close enough. The taste was entirely new, fresh and clean, almost like biting into an orange. The texture wasn’t gritty like it looked, and it didn’t make me gag, which was a bonus. I wasn’t begging for seconds, but I could appreciate the dish as more than a rich, pretentious hors d'oeuvre that I’d seen on TV.
By the time my steak finally arrived, I thought I’d already experienced the biggest surprise of my meal. But my tuna steak was the most succulent and juicy steak I’d ever had. It didn’t taste like seafood. The texture was that of any piece of beef, but the flavors were more refined and subtle than with beef steak. It wasn’t drowned in a sauce or marinated to hell. It was the first steak I ate where the flavors stood on their own. Every bite was as good as the last, and by the time I finished, I could have ordered two more.
The bill was hefty and we were definitely underdressed. But none of that mattered. We got into our van while the stars were coming out. The only sound was the tide going out. Everything was quiet and our stomachs were full.
Nicholas Andre is a senior in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers, pursuing a double major in journalism and theater arts.
Photo Credit: Guido Gautsch
