Wicked Oyster
Open for Dinner: Tuesday thru Saturday @ 430p
Lunch on Saturday 1130a-230p
Live Music Tuesday & Thursday evenings
On the menu:
- The Pickles
- Warm House Focaccia
- Fish N Chips
- Roasted Half Chicken
On a frostbitten evening that reeked of Wellfleet’s peculiar blend of salt air and subdued urgency, I set out to hear The Volunteers. My body was clad—draped, if I’m honest—in layers almost indecently lazy for public consumption. Yet the prospect of a saxophonist breaking the plague of acoustic plucking prevalent this time of year compelled me.
The cold makes my eyes water and can induce over-yawning but it was out of my system by the time my martini was set down. I was content to be distracted for the night with two, maybe three, cocktails. I had no idea the espionage in which I was to be engaged.
I was able to grab a two-top in the dining room but only because I knew the host. It was filling up quickly, as it always will on live music nights (make a note!) and I’m certain two neck-craners were left waiting longer at the bar for my indulgence but so it does, doesn’t it?
It was so warm and deep sepia colored inside. The candles on the tables were flashbacks to Lady Lyndon’s house. Wonderful home, though I pitied the woman for her moronic life choice of second husband. Foolish foolish woman. All for what? To have one son run off and another die? And then the shame of enduring squalor after the whole other life she’d led?
I was laughing about her bad luck when my real entertainment arrived. Two men entered—unassuming in every sense. Straight—you could tell by the shoes. Unperfumed. Loud jackets zipped against the cold as though to armor themselves against anything remotely nuanced. As they ordered drinks (a Smoking Mirrors & Bulleit on the rocks), their rambling thinking aloud made it clear these were not their first drinks of the evening—naturally my hopes rose. If nothing else they could be obnoxious and asked to leave for my amusement.
Things began to take a real shape after they’d ordered the appetizers (The Pickles & the Warm House Focaccia), this is when the Bulleit drinker was nudged by Mr Mirrors back into some aborted tale left for dead in the night’s colder shadows.. Imagine my excitement when our bourbon drinker volunteered to disregard the whole long story but was then encouraged by his friend to dig back into it - it was as if the Lord himself had thrown me a life raft. I eased my disinterested hand to my ear to harness the acoustics and glared at the musicians on stage from the darkness of the dining room in effort to lower their collective volume through telekinesis.
The Storyteller apparently has questionably insensitive acquaintances in his military past (imagine!) and is embroiled in an ongoing group thread with all the eloquence and subtlety of a caps-lock key held hostage. I audibly moaned a sigh of sadness knowing I’d never see this thread, no doubt littered with green bubbles and quotation marks transcribing emojis with all the intended impact of a verbalized comic strip.
The text thread must have been hot because our Storyteller’s bourbon was suddenly halfway finished after he’d revealed the premise of his story and took a break to indulge in his cocktail. There are four friends in this chat discussing this particular issue, the plutonium politics that are not only trans issues but a child’s place in that minefield. Two of the friends fall to one side of the absolute mess, two to the other. To further the isopraxis each side had a dominant texter and a … let’s just say it: a submissive texter. Lucky for me, our friend was the dominant (which I’d known reflexively) on his side of the issue so the vitriol was still near enough to the surface for text quotes to not only come flying from memory but close enough to to the bottom of the thread itself to be read aloud from the source material.
The bourbon drinker quoted verbatim, lifting lines—dripping in screen-garbled nuance—directly from this sordid exchange of over-explanations and misused ellipses. I don’t recall on which side he came down, it’s more or less trivial, one should do as one likes whenever possible. His companion, the Smoking Mirrors drinker, navigated the tale with occasional probes, skillfully goading yet never breaking the pace.
Appetizers
The Pickles & Warm House Focaccia
The appetizers were set down and were violently dug into—indeed, the men were straight—while the brunt of the text conversation, unexplored material that made its way out into the open, born through these ongoing texts over 30 hours of labor, was retold. The Listener, a practiced man at this evening’s trade, I would guess a positive relationship with the key women in his life, kept his behavior loose but his attention taut. He asked for clarity when needed, but never interrupted the flow of the story. He was a little slower on the uptake than I would have preferred but his need for remedial guidance made the ordering of another drink without losing my place very simple. (It may be worth mentioning, I now also ordered a Smoking Mirrors.)
Dinner
The entrees arrived and I was expecting them to abandon their soap opera for their dinner, which looked stunning, honestly … but I was, again, so pleasantly surprised.
Fish N Chips
Simple and substantial - the piece of fried fish was served over a bed of fingerling potatoes and a side of house pickled onions. There was also tartar sauce on the plate though the Listener must have been as aghast as I was to see a serving of ketchup as well. To serve ketchup in Lady Lyndon’s home was a note of dissonance for which I was not prepared.
Roasted Half Chicken
What a lovely presentation! Served with braised kale, polenta, and butter jus, this dish was the most captivating that I saw on any table in proximity. And I was looking. When I return to the Wicked O in next week or the week after, I’ll be sure to treat myself. I knew that our Orator’s time at the podium had come to an end—with that food waiting for your attention, his numb friends stood no chance.
Just as I’d resigned myself to step outside for a cigarette and return focused again on the band, the Listener began asking—innocent enough, I thought—if the bourbon drinker had any personal stakes in these divisive politics. This led to an increasingly tense pas de deux of questions and clipped answers. Each reply oozed irritation—the Listener’s polite prodding morphing, to the bourbon drinker’s ears, into condescension.
By the time our irate narrator slapped the table—bereft of even a butter knife for effect—I had long surrendered to voyeuristic glee. It was at this point, most of the way through my second Smoking Mirror, that I forgot myself and was sure there’d be a commotion. I had positioned my phone to capture this impending fracas but my hopes, and elevated heart rate, were dashed when the Listener beckoned the server (a superb bitch-looking woman who any man in the restaurant would have subjugated himself to her while she couldn’t have cared less if this whole building went up in flames this very second with everyone, maybe even herself, in it) and asked her for two shots.
After that they’d abandoned the evening's topic in the males-only manner of a Men’s Humor meme and left the restaurant after some remark appropriately acknowledging the hot waitress. As he returned his chair to its home beneath the table, the Listener nodded to me politely, and I bad to him, more smugly than polite though I did raise my (second) martini glass though I doubt he understood I was patronizing him. On his way out, however, the Storyteller muttered that he hoped I enjoyed myself and told his friend I couldn’t stop looking over and snickering at them. I heard him perform some crude impression of my laugh before the door closed but it was poorly executed. With that low level of attention to detail, what was his word worth, anyway?
•••••
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