Whenever Mark Mavrantonis comes across an oyster that refuses to open, he caresses the bottom of its shell and speaks to it softly. “They’re not stupid,” he says. “They know something’s up. Imagine your eyes are shut, you don’t know what’s going on, you’re moving around a lot, and this guy tries to shove a knife in the side of your head.” But if he reminds the oyster of its position at the bottom of the food chain, he says, it will relax and accept its fate.
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After returning to California Mavrantonis spent a few months working on a poultry farm in Petaluma before he got sick of looking at chickens and ducks. “I had no idea what I wanted to do,” he says, so he got in his car and drove away. At a gas station in Point Reyes he asked another customer if there were any cheap hotels in the area. The man invited him to stay over at his place, an oyster farm, and the next morning Mavrantonis had his first sample, an oyster grown in the waters of Tomales Bay called the Hog Island Sweetwater. “It was really pretty,” he says. “It had little purple stripes. They’re really sweet and plump and have a smoky finish to them.” He absentmindedly put the shell in his pocket and spent the next four days helping out at the farm, pulling up oysters by the rack, cleaning them, and breaking up any that had clumped together.
Fascinated by the process of turning a microscopic “spat” into a creature that is–he struggles for the right word–“awesome,” Mavrantonis got back on the road and traveled to oyster farms all over the Pacific northwest. “The oysters were really soothing,” he says. “It was the polar opposite of what I was doing before.” Along the way he reached into his pocket and rediscovered the shell from his first oyster; he drilled a hole and hung it from his rearview mirror. Today it sits under his kitchen window at home. “My cats won’t even touch it,” he says. “They know it’s mine. They look at it and they’re afraid.”
The next year Mavrantonis wound up replacing the chef at the McCormick & Schmick’s on Chestnut Street in Chicago. In his downtime he started competing on the U.S. circuit, where the emphasis is on speed rather than the quality of the shuck. In 2002 he placed fourth in the national championships at the Saint Mary’s County Oyster Festival in Maryland, a feat he’s repeated twice since then. “If I could just screw the salary and be a ten-dollar oyster shucker for a year I could probably get a little closer,” he says. Three years ago, at the Guinness Oyster Festival on Goose Island (an event affiliated with the annual world championship in Galway, Ireland), he and a team of three opened 16,745 in a single day, a new world record. Mavrantonis, who shucked over 5,000 by himself, says he couldn’t move his left arm for three days.
Fulton’s took over a space, previously occupied by Bob Chinn’s Crab House, that included two ten-by-fifteen-foot seafood tanks, which inspired Mavrantonis to take his passion to a new level. With the intention of creating the first midwestern oyster farm right there in the restaurant, he persuaded the government of Prince Edward Island to donate about 100,000 Malpeque oyster spat by arguing that it would help market the variety in the U.S. But the operation proved too expensive. Instead, he turned his attention to ever-more-inventive ways of ensuring quality. After a visit to the FedEx facility near O’Hare, during which he realized his oysters were shipped alongside human organs, he tried unsuccessfully to obtain a stash of live human organ stickers to distribute to his farmers. “What would be shipped faster than a human organ?” he says. A global positioning system enables him to scout the water temperature of oyster beds; anything warmer than 54 degrees Fahrenheit is off-limits. “I actually prefer to buy oysters from someplace where they have to cut holes in the ice.” And don’t get him started on warm-water oysters. Because they have a greater tendency to harbor dangerous bacteria, eating a gulf coast oyster is “one of the dumbest things you can do,” he says. “I’d rather play Russian roulette.”
