On a recent afternoon in Brooklyn, Ben Harney Jr. behind his dark blue cart in front of BK Lobster’s Bushwick location, carefully prying open Fanny Bay, bluepoint, and Prince Edward Island oysters with his paring knife and presenting them to customers on a bed of ice. Every now and then a curious passerby asked him what he was doing, to which he replied, “Selling oysters,” raising his voice loud enough to be heard over the rumble of the J-train and hip-hop music from a portable speaker.
Mr. Harney, a 37-year-old resident of Crown Heights known as Moody, is the owner of the Real Mother Shuckers, a small business he founded in 2019 to provide a more approachable oyster experience.
“People can be a little suspicious of a guy who sells oysters on the street,” Mr. Harney said. “So I serve them in a comfortable way so that some can have the experience and judge for themselves.”
For $3 to $4 per oyster, customers can get their shellfish “naked” or “clothed,” which includes three options: a classic mignonette; “sushi” style, with thin strips of seaweed studded with cucumber and ponzu; or “candy apple,” with green apple, sour yuzu, and hot sauce.
Though now associated with the city’s luxurious raw bars and seafood towers, oysters were once ubiquitous throughout New York, raw, smoked, pickled, in creamy stews, baked whole or mixed with bread and stuffed as an oyster dressing. In the 1800s, the lower reaches of the Hudson River were home to some 350 square miles of oyster beds, and street stalls selling oyster snacks were a common sight.
“Before the 20th century, when people thought of New York, they thought of oysters,” wrote journalist Mark Kurlansky in his 2007 book, “The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell.” “New Yorkers ate them all the time. They have also sold them by the millions.”
Mr. Harney knew nothing about this history growing up in Brooklyn, and it wasn’t until he lived in Louisiana that he encountered raw oysters. The meaty, plump round flavors of Gulf oysters didn’t appeal to him at first, but when he returned to New York in 2016, he started working as a shucker at Maison Premiere, a stylish oyster and cocktail bar in Williamsburg, where he became acquainted with himself with more than two dozen species of bivalves. “It made me respect the oyster for the first time,” Mr. Harney said.
The process of shelling, smelling, and serving hundreds of oysters a night sent Mr. Harney down a rabbit hole. He read “The Big Oyster” and began following the work of organizations such as the Billion Oyster Project, a nonprofit working to restore oyster reefs in New York Harbor after overfishing and pollution led to the decline of the oyster population. in the 1900s.
He also learned that many of the oystermen, sailors, and whalers in the city were African American. “Navigation was central to the freedom struggle and central to economic survival,” said Jeffrey Bolster, a history professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire and the author of “Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail.”
Oysters and seafaring provided the status of black men in the 1800s, Bolster added. One of the most prominent oyster men of the time was Thomas Downing, an African-American businessman and abolitionist who opened Thomas Downing Oyster House in 1825 at 5 Broad Street in lower Manhattan. His oyster parlor was one of the city’s most popular restaurants and also served as a stop along the Underground Railroad.
When mr. Harney opened his pop-up outside his favorite Brooklyn bar, he started telling everyone who passed by about Mr. Downing and the history of oysters in New York. He especially wanted black people to know these stories. “We’re so far from the history of boats and oysters that whenever we see an oyster, we go, ‘Ew, those are white people [expletive],'” he said. “But that’s not true, and we played such a big part in this story.”
“Ben Moody is a very important person because he is the black oyster man,” said Stephen Satterfield, a TV host and co-founder of Whetstone Media, who named Mr. Harney starred in the first season of the Netflix show “High on the Hog”. “He is part of the Black Oysterman tradition in New York and a great ambassador of that legacy in New York. He is a showman and a teacher.”
Earlier this summer, Mr. Harney built a fully collapsible cart so he can host private events in addition to his weekly rotation of performances at BK Lobster, Sahadi’s in Industry City and a kiosk on Governors Island that opens on July 4.
Other plans for his business include franchising, creating oyster programs in restaurants, and operating a physical space where he can expose students to oysters and shells.
Ultimately, Mr. Harney wants oysters to become a common food – for everyone – again. “New York was the oyster capital of the world,” he said. “And we eat hot dogs?”
