The Suttsu oyster festival is one-day oyster and seafood festival held on the shoreline of the Sea of Japan that attracts hundreds of Japanese ostreaphiles every year. Suttsu oysters come on line well after the primary season has finished, giving oyster lovers one more chance to gorge on oysters before the long oyster-less summer begins.
The festival is short, starting at 9am in the morning and finishing, “when the oysters run out”, which was around 2pm last year. Its also a pretty simple affair – there are no shucking or slurping competitions, no boat tours, not even any piped music. But the seafood, the cold beer, the camaraderie and activity, and the fresh-off-the-boat seaside setting was an irresistible combination, even at 10:30am on a Sunday morning.
The jury is out on how good the Suttsu oysters really are. I had tried them several times before, and enjoyed them straight out of the half shell without even lemon. Nice and plump, deliciously fresh yet I must admit unremarkable compared to my Akkeshis. Indeed, some of my Japanese customers at Ezo Seafoods opined that they weren’t suitable for eating raw. They were served cooked at the festival, without any lemon or “mentsu” sauce. I had only 6 of them, but I could have easily had double or more. But there was more to the festival than just the oysters.
Tsubugai, for example. Big green Tsubugai (a type of shellfish), were served up in bowls of three for only ¥500 yen (they are usually ¥500 each!). Boiled in a sweet soy sauce (sugar, sake, soy), these were so good I went back for seconds. In addition, scallops, which are farmed and caught wild all around this seafood island, were on sale, barbequed with a shot of soy sauce. I lined up for 15 minutes for these, and bought six of them, for only ¥600.
There was a lot of shucking going on. The sellers shucked in the typical Japanese style. Holding the shell in their hand with a rubber glove, they go in through the lip and cut the bottom muscle. They then turn the top shell upside down so the meat is attached to the top shell and the oyster is exposed in all of its plum and shiny glory. It’s a great way to present the oyster, but you do lose all of the “first water”*. A lot of regular visitors were opening up their polystyrene boxes, injecting the sharp blade into the shell, and shooting up right there. Leather-clad Harley driving Bikers were doing it, old women were doing it, so I ended up doing the same. And then some more.
Sitting on the edge of the wharves, we also spied some Sea urchin on the bottom of the ocean in about 3 meters of water. They didn’t look big enough to warrant a dive into the icy waters, but they did get me thinking about my next Hokkaido seafood adventure.
