The smell, when you walk down the street, is of French fries, cooked in the same hot grease as the clams—though clam strips is what it says on the #10 cans they come in. They are dunked into banks of deep-fryers by the same people who do the roofing and house painting in the spring. French fries and clam strips are joined in the bubbling oil by scallops and shrimp, flounder fillets, and rings of squid, all coated in the same universal breading. By the town pier there are funnel cakes and the fudge shop, adding a sickly sweet note to the airborne miasma of atomized fat. As you walk down Main Street after the dinner rush, past the Shell Shop, the Shirt Shop, the Dinghy Dock, Neptune Lounge, Olde Towne Tavern, Cap’n Barnes Galley Bar, Candles ’N’ Things, Reggie’s Pizza, and the Scupper, you hear the clatter of hundreds of lobster carcasses scraping against heavy Buffalo China plates.
Tomorrow morning, former cheerleaders from the local high school will cut lemons into wedges, fill bowls with pilot biscuits in little plastic wrappers, pluck sprigs of curly parsley to float in ice water. They’ll line up monkey dishes and ramekins, top off the ketchup bottles, restock the lobster bibs, fold napkins, and gather around garbage stockades in rear parking lots to smoke and gossip about last night.
I’m six years old, playing with molded plastic army men in the beach grass of the dunes. Here comes the truck that sprays insecticide in a huge, smoky cloud from its rear; I join the other children from the block, running in its wake. For dinner, there will be mussels and steamed lobster, corn on the cob, Jersey tomatoes.
I’m twelve years old, same dunes, smoking pilfered menthol cigarettes with some girls who are older. For dinner, there will be pan-fried tails of the blowfish I caught off the dock, or take-out pizza. Somebody’s dad will fire up the grill and cook hamburgers and hot dogs in a backyard of pebbles and crushed seashells. The adults will get tipsy and play charades or rummy or Mille Bornes or whatever game is popular that summer. The kids will slip off into the dark to build fires on the beach.
I’m seventeen years old, “wrapping the bakes” in the cellar of the Riptide Lounge—there’s a sinkful of potatoes I am detailed to seal in portion-controlled squares of tinfoil, which I’ll then pierce with a fork. After that, I’ll pull the muscles off a bushel of sticky sea scallops, wash the spinach and romaine, dodge the pots and pans the cooks throw into the pot sink next to me. Then it’s bust suds, dive for pearls (wash dishes) from five to midnight, mop the kitchen, strip the stove, drag the mats out into the parking lot to hose them down. Then it’s the glorious walk home. The town’s other restaurants are closing down too—dishwashers running their last loads, bar customers with raised voices laughing at unheard jokes, the clatter of plates loaded into trays, boat whistles, the occasional foghorn.
I’m eighteen years old and the menu is clam chowder, kale soup, shrimp cocktail, lobster salad, Caesar salad, oysters on the half, clams on the half, broiled fish, fried fish, fisherman’s platter, steamed cherrystones, squid stew, cioppino, steamed mussels in red sauce, steamed mussels in white wine, steamed lobster, broiled lobster, stuffed lobster, stuffed flounder, broiled bluefish, haddock amandine, New York strip, ribeye. I can cook the whole menu and think I’m fucking Escoffier.
by Anthony Bourdain, Lucky Peach | Read more:
Image: Cari Vander Yacht
