THE OYSTER AND CHAMPAGNE EVENING

The Oyster and Champagne Evening is an evening in early October in a private room in New York, taken for the night: oysters opened to order at a table, champagne poured beside it, and two or three beds served side by side so that they can be tasted against one another. Nothing else is put out until later.

It exists because oysters are, in Mark Kurlansky’s words, “biologically identical” from Louisiana to Newfoundland, and yet “if you put them in one cove or another they will taste different.”

The Big Oyster

The Lenape left “huge piles of oyster shells”, some “carbon-dated to as far back as 6900 B.C.”, and Pearl Street takes its name from one of their shell middens; the Dutch called it Parelstraat, “named for the many oysters found in the river.” Ellis, Liberty and Black Tom were the Oyster Islands of Upper New York Bay. In the colony oysters were sold on the street, and pickled with nutmeg and black pepper and sent to the other colonies and the Caribbean.

“In past centuries, if you were to say, I’m going to New York, the most likely response would be, enjoy the oysters... All five boroughs produced oysters,” Kurlansky writes. Through the nineteenth century the beds of New York Harbor were the largest source of oysters in the world, and on any day late in the century six million of them lay on barges along the waterfront. They were sold by name, as Staten Islanders, Jamaicas, Rockaways and East River, and eaten in basement oyster cellars, where the Canal Street Plan gave all you could eat for six cents, at a time when Delmonico’s charged fifty cents a berry for out-of-season strawberries. Thomas Downing, the “New York Oyster King”, opened his oyster house at 5 Broad Street in 1825, with linens, fine china and chandeliers; the City chose him to cater the Boz Ball for Charles Dickens in 1842, and his house was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Overharvesting, disease, effluent and silt destroyed the beds. By 1916 most of the beds of the five boroughs had been closed, and in 1927 the last of them closed. The Oyster Bar under the Guastavino vaults of Grand Central opened in February 1913. Since 2015 the Billion Oyster Project has gathered spent shells from the city’s restaurants to build reefs in the harbour again.

The season is old. In 1599 Henry Buttes wrote that “The oyster is unseasonable and unwholesome in all months that have not the letter R in their name”, and New Yorkers once called August “Argust” so that they could go on eating them. The rule has its reasons: the bay oysters spawn from the end of June until mid-August, and in the warm months they spoil more easily. October has an R.

Champagne is the Court’s choice over the Muscadet, Chablis and Sancerre that are traditionally served. Its bubbles, the house of Laurent-Perrier says, “awaken the palate and lighten the oyster’s texture”, and its acidity balances the salt; for raw oysters, the low-dosage wines, Brut Nature or Extra Brut, are the match. The oysters are served “fresh but never icy”, and once opened the first water is poured off and the oyster left to settle in its second. “If an oyster is shucked properly,” Kurlansky says, “its heart is beating as it slides down your throat.”

The Evening

One evening in early October, in a private room in New York taken for the night. The Court keeps no house of its own.

Oysters are opened to order at a table, and champagne is poured beside it.

Two or three beds are served side by side, so that they can be tasted against one another.

Nothing else is put out until later.

What Is Asked

A lounge suit. Nothing is published for a private room; Debrett’s describes the lounge suit as “a dark or grey suit, collar and tie”, for dinner in a restaurant, and the Court keeps to it.

Nobody is pitched at the table.

The Places

The number of places and the sum are stated in the invitation.

The Court’s White Tie Dinner follows at the end of the month.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.