On Wednesday I drove my parents down to Long Beach Island for a nice dinner at Harvey Cedars Shellfish Co. It was a nasty drive down to the shore in torrential downpours that I seemed to be ceaselessly driving into.... It was a fun time, and I got some good seafood, so it was worth it. We started off with a bread basket that we didn't really touch until my dad started his dozen clams on the half-shell. They were all relatively small so they were plump and juicy. I snitched a couple, and the cocktail sauce was chunky with tomatoes and its only downfall was not quite enough horseradish for our tastes. Adding freshly squeezed lemon juice to it did the trick, bringing out the slightly hidden kick in the sinuses. The clams tasted of the ocean, signifying their superb flavor and freshness of locally-harvested seafood. The bigger ones were slightly chewy, but that's what happens when clams to be savored small get too big.
- Clams on the 1/2 Shell
My parents feasted on a double-portion of freshly caught and steamed lobster and mussel platter with Jersey corn on the cob. The lobster meat was rich and tasty with butter melted on the side, while the mussels lacked the freshness of all of the other seafood we were served.
- Parents' Lobster Platter
I enjoyed my own platter of jumbo shrimp and mussels with my own serving of the same locally-grown Jersey corn. My first thought is that the corn was absolutely the best fresh-steamed, butterless corn I have had in a long, long time. It was sweet and had its own wonderful substance of flavor, and it was not overly sweet or starchy. It was the perfection of Jersey corn in its prime: a bite to the kernel followed by a rush of sweet, mellowed by the crunch and subsequent agglutination of starchiness. It went down easily all on its own and could easily have been the star of the dish for me. I love my vegetables! The shrimp was equally tasty, though I did have to peel it as described on the menu. How else are you going to serve pick-n-peel steamed shrimp, right? Despite playing with my food, I enjoyed the freshness of the shrimp, which were quite plump and substantially packed with shrimpy flavor. They really had a meaty bite to them, their slight blandness characteristic of eating shrimp after shrimp was completely taken away by the excellence of the cocktail sauce accompanying them. Instead of masking their delicate shrimpiness, the cocktail sauce enhanced their seafood flavor, the lemon bringing out the true flavors of the shellfish. The texture of chunky tomatoes combined with the meatiness of the shrimp really played out nicely in the mouth.
- Shrimp Platter with Jersey Corn
Many different textures were represented from the corn to the mussels to the shrimp, all topped off with the cocktail sauce. The mussels, however, were nothing at all about which I will be raving. They had a slight fishy odor to them that initially turned me way off to even sampling them. I placed many of them into my garbage bowl, sampling only those that were open and faintly smelling of the ocean. Even these had a slightly old aftertaste that the cocktail sauce neither masked nor enhanced. Nothing could have been done to enhance those mussels: they simply did not add to the entirety of the meal. They were somewhat alien in their poor flavor, texture, and scent. They were chewy, a little slimy, and incapable of being enjoyed.
The mussels aside, the evening went wonderfully, ending with my consumption of both my mother's half-ear of corn on the cob and my own. Unfortunately it was an "animal-protein fest" but I can deal with that every once in a while as long as it's seafood. I see salads in my future ; ). I polished off three dishes of cocktail sauce with the shrimp and bread, and enjoyed every bite of the rest of the meal. We got Dunkin' Donuts on the way home, which, working for Starbucks, has been the WORST coffee experience of my snobby life! I will never go to another DD, since the espresso I ordered was the flavor of dirty dish water without even the slightest hint of brewed coffee flavor. I can't handle crappy coffee, so I will stick to my own home-pulled espresso and that of Starbucks for the rest of my existence : )
