How I Fell in Love With the Oyster, One of the Bay Area’s Great Multicultural Treats

Frisco Foodies is a recurring column in which a San Francisco local shares food memories of growing up in a now rapidly changing city.

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n college on the weekends, a couple of friends and I used to grab a big bag of oysters from Pacific Supermarket, and a box of Coronas and Smirnoff Ice, and then we’d barbecue those bad boys up on the grill with a soy-sauce-lemon-hot-sauce mixture to drizzle over top. We weren’t picky about what kind of oysters they were or how ethically they were raised, or whether the name of the month had an “r” in it to indicate the safest season to eat them. We just loved the ritual of taking our time eating and catching up.

We called ourselves the Oyster Crew, and for every perfect five we shucked, there was always one oyster that was a little too large to swallow in one bite or too full of crunchy sand in its belly. Those we half-swallowed and forced down before they’d almost re-emerge in a beer burp. But a quick fist-pound to the chest, eyes watering, and we were back in the game, ready for the next round of oysters steaming hot off the grill.

Since then, I’ve had my fair share of oysters: raw Kumamotos by the dozen in Sausalito and baked Rockefellers in New York’s Grand Central Station. I’ve eaten them fried up in cornmeal and overstuffed into a po’ boy in Oakland and, my personal favorite, char-grilled in Creole spices and butter with a golden Parmesan crust in New Orleans. I just can’t get enough of these bivalves, their briny liquor coating my taste buds as they slip whole, uninterrupted down my throat. While opining on the oyster’s characteristics could get downright, ermm, sexual, its aphrodisiac qualities are probably why it turned from a poor man’s food to a sophisticated symbol of luxury. I even remember a Punky Brewster episode where an oyster accidentally slipped down Punky’s dress during a fancy dinner party while she pretended to relish this rich-person delicacy.

After college, I whet my expensive appetite for oysters on various $1 oyster days around the Bay Area: in Berkeley at Skates on the Bay, at Woodhouse Fish Company on Tuesdays, and sitting on a dock in Oakland on a gorgeous day at Lake Chalet. These feasts taught me that I could certainly pound a dozen solo or “to the face,” and also that I would have to make more money to support this habit — especially now that rising costs have made these deals a distant memory.

Anyway, with the Oyster Crew it was always the quality of time, not the quantity of oysters eaten, that made the experience so worthwhile. And in all these years, no restaurant meal was ever quite able to recreate that feeling.

Recently, though, I finally found the perfect conditions for one of those old-school oyster roasts. On a late summer weekend, my family headed to Point Reyes National Park, to a tiny, secluded beach that only allowed 40 cars in at a time. My cousins and I wanted one last hurrah before the school year started, and since the best oysters were only a couple miles up the coast we did a potluck of our favorite dishes to complement them. The night before, I prepared a batch of my favorite San Francisco-style garlic noodles and made a compound butter with Creole seasoning, minced garlic and parsley to melt over the oysters while they cooked. I bought a French baguette to slice and put on top along with a sprinkling of Pecorino cheese, to replicate those chargrilled oysters I’d loved so much in New Orleans. And to spoon over the oysters we planned on eating raw, I had a Guamanian-style finadené — made with coconut vinegar, minced Thai chilis, green onions and soy sauce — marinating in a large Mason jar in the fridge.

When we pulled up to the lot roundabout at Point Reyes, it was mostly Asian and Latino families, and a Filipino biker gang called the Crispy Patas, who had set up big oyster picnics like ours. Like most of the Bay Area’s most famous oyster spots, the multiethnic crowd was a far cry from the mostly Caucasian-inclined demo that you might associate with your typical New England–style seaside oyster feast. I was all for it.

Once we got out to the beach, my teenage son, Kahlil, got his first lesson in shucking oysters. “Look for the hinge,” I’d say, as he struggled through his first couple broken-shelled halves. I’ve always had the philosophy that when you have to work hard for your meal, it tastes that much better. That oyster roast aroma wafted to the edges of the beach, garnering comments from hungry strangers who passed our site and yelled, “Smells great over there!”

Of all the oysters I’d devoured, I finally found a combination that I could eat happily for the rest of my life.

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It’s hard not to feel spoiled and a little bit smug when you live this close to some of the best oysters in the world. Locals and transplants alike have been feasting on them since time immemorial, or at least for as long as we could document the evidence that Indigenous peoples left behind.

Across Tomales Bay estuary is Drake’s Bay, one of the first places where the Indigenous Miwok came into contact with European settlers. It was a stop on the Manila Galleon route, a highly-guarded secret transpacific route that Spaniards charted from Acapulco and the Americas to China via the Philippines — and, for thousands of years, the coastal waters also teemed with Olympia oysters, the only species native to the West Coast. As indicated by the giant shellmounds — or ancient heaps of oyster shells — piled up around the bay, Indigenous populations, including the Miwoks and the Ohlones have been enjoying this seaside delicacy for years as a key part of their diet.

During the Gold Rush, entrepreneurs imported Atlantic oysters from the East Coast and introduced them into the local waters, where they thrived for a number of years, serving as an inexpensive source of protein for the working class. Around this time, the Hangtown Fry — the Bay Area’s most famous oyster dish — was invented by a miner from Shirttail Bend loaded with nuggets and gold dust. As the story goes, he walked into a saloon and asked for the most expensive meal on the menu. Oysters and eggs happened to be the priciest ingredients they had on hand.

The oysters most closely associated with the Bay Area today are actually Pacific oysters, like Miyagis and Kumamatos, brought over from Japan in the 1930s. Hog Island Oyster Company, the most prominent oyster farm in Tomales Bay, is known for its Pacific Sweetwaters and Kumamotos, and it’s also one of the local companies helping to bring back the native Olympias.

Founded by three marine biologists in 1983, the company uses ecologically friendly techniques like “off-bottom” farming to minimize the impact on seabeds and enhance water quality. (No sandy bellies for me to accidentally burp up later.) But the oysters are still affected by climate change and the acidification of the ocean, which threaten their habitats.

Given how much more expensive everything has gotten, it makes sense that we can no longer enjoy our venerated $1 oyster days, though some places like Waterbar, Mission Rock and Park Chalet in Golden Gate Park serve them at close to that price during happy hour. And a serendipitous grocery run clued me in on the fact that Whole Foods, of all places, still sells dollar oysters at their raw bar on Fridays only — though they’ll require a little elbow grease to shuck yourself.

But even without those bargains, I’ve still enjoyed myself as an ostreaphile, delighting in the flavors only an immigrant population could introduce, like the surprising sweetness of a strawberry purée paired with chili jam and fried shallots on the dressed oyster I enjoyed at Jo’s Modern Thai in Oakland (before the original chef left). Or the spicy tang of calamansi-habanero sauce on the Royal Miyagis at Abacá on Fisherman’s Wharf. When I did a poll on my Instagram Stories, people shared so many different favorite ways to eat oysters: with jeow som (what my friend calls “Cambodian crack sauce”), with a simple squeeze of lemon or fresh grated horseradish, or “fried hard like a mofo on a bistro salad.”

Whether the oyster is prepared simply to highlight its “merroir” (the marine equivalent of terroir), or made intricate like the histories of the populations that overlapped to bring it here, it’s the perfect blank canvas to project a uniquely Bay Arean identity that people can enjoy, their way.

For my birthday — as consolation for being born a winter baby — I once again feasted on local oysters to my heart’s content. Tired of waiting for Dungeness crab season to open, in true Sagittarius fashion, I took matters into my own hands and made a reservation for two at the Tomales Bay location of Hog Island Oyster Company. There was nothing fancy about the meal, but they were nice enough to give us the best seats in the house, a seaside picnic bench overlooking the pristine marshlands of the estuary, while I ate dozens of oysters that were sourced mere steps away. The spicy Calabrian chili–baked oysters at Hog Island’s Marin Mart location had stolen my heart during the previous year’s birthday celebration, but it had always been a dream of mine to see the original location — to take in the merrior that made these particular Sweetwaters so special.

Not yet even noontime, I downed a dozen raw with mignonette and Tabasco, while I waited for the bourbon-chipotle barbecued oysters to arrive hot off the grill. When they did, I couldn’t get enough of the buttery sauce left at the bottom that I sopped up with bread, the slight tingle left on my lips from the chipotle.

When the last grilled oyster was finished, still piping hot, we motioned the server for another dozen, an expensive decision that allowed us some more time to take in the gorgeous surroundings (no cell service to distract you!) and another steaming tray cooked to order. It was a perfect way to reflect on the year, be grateful to the land, the people who take care of it and feed us, and waterways we must sustain to enjoy future birthdays like this one.

After all, I know we’ll be back again next year, either beachin’ it up with the cousins or bringing my kids with us back to Tomales Bay next time. Those kids love oysters now too, even my six-year old, and I might have to save my pennies all year for this new iteration of the Oyster Crew.

Rocky Rivera is a journalist, emcee, author and activist from San Francisco. She has released four albums through her label, Beatrock Music, and a ten-volume mixtape series with DJ Roza — her most recent album, Long Kiss Goodnight, dropped in Sept. 2024. She released her first book, entitled Snakeskin: Essays by Rocky Rivera, in 2021.