The Minnesota State Fair has an undeniable, supernatural power to grow on its visitors. The fair doesn’t so much grind down its haters as it takes an early kernel of joy and slowly adds to it layer by layer, year by year. The particulars of this strange growth, of course, depend on the depth and flavor of one’s curiosity.
This partially explains how someone might wake up one day, years removed from their first State Fair visit, with a screaming need to stand in the late-August heat swigging milk alongside a barn teeming with nursing sows. Haunted woman that I am, I’ve spent the better part of two decades fighting off the urge to order oysters at the fair. Only yesterday, amid 94-degree actual-temperature heat, did I finally lose that battle.
It’d be understandable to write off this dark fascination as a bout of recurrent delusion. I mean, why would there be shellfish at the Great Minnesota Get-Together? To my knowledge, 4-H does not (yet) offer local competitors the opportunity to demonstrate their prowess in farming and harvesting cockles, clams, and/or oysters.
Counterintuitively, being thousands of miles from the nearest briny bay seems to have fed oysters’ tendency to crop up unexpectedly here in the Twin Cities. Maybe you remember in the early 2010s, when the erstwhile Nomad World Pub offered $1 oysters on their West Bank patio during football season. No? Well, that era was short lived, but it also definitely happened! Similarly, it’s not exactly obvious why a park shelter at Minnehaha Falls would host a bustling (and trusted!) open-air seafood joint primarily during months that end in -y, but since I’m not here to ruin good things, we’ll keep this moving along.
Point is: The idea of oysters at the State Fair is weird, to borrow Gov. Tim Walz's in vogue descriptor. But we exist in the context of *mumble mumble* and if we’re being completely honest, the entire State Fair is pretty weird! Or at least wildly chaotic.
Amid the chaos, you can be forgiven for not taking note of the Fish & Chips Seafood Shoppe. Until recently it had occupied a fiendish little perch at the corner of Liggett & Carnes, within an unappetizing distance of both the Horse Barn and Mighty Midway. It’s just that once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.
Now celebrating its 50th year, the Seafood Shoppe relocated inside the Food Building around the corner from the Mouth Trap, perennial heaviest-hitters in the fair’s cheese curd game. You’ll know you’ve found the right place when the crowd thins beneath a mustard yellow marquee that screams SCALLOPS, CALAMARI, and CLAM STRIPS in a chic 1970s-does-1930s font. You will be the only person in line.
The Seafood Shoppe is staffed by chatty, mostly bored young adults who—to their credit—said that ordering lobster is The Move. Unfortunately only oysters (and maybe clams) would put an end to my specific affliction, so I didn’t take their suggestion.
Instead I went for the sampler on a stick. With three mini crab cake balls, one fried oyster sandwiched between a coconut shrimp and another plain ol’ fried shrimp, plus a block of fried salmon and a pair of fried scallops. Only clam strips would be absent from the buffet.
“They’re super long and thin,” explained a youth at the register. “Really hard to get on a stick.” He made a gesture suggesting a (brief) lifetime teeming with frustration from having tried, over and over, to pierce a clam strip with a blunt wooden rod.
After handing over $15.95, another very youthful person informed me, “This will take a little longer.”
“Good!” I blurted.
The only thing that could definitely turn ordering shellfish in the oceanless Midwest during an August heatwave at a food stand with no line into a wholly doomed proposition would be receiving your order immediately.
The next however many minutes passed in deep contemplation of the decades of choices that had led to this time and place, all while sweating profusely in stagnant air. Later, the radio weatherman would announce that, at roughly this moment, the heat index had crept up to nearly 110 degrees.
This is the part where I tell you how much I really, truly wanted to be surprised at the State Fair. After all these years of fairgoing, I hoped to find something overlooked to perhaps be tried and true—maybe new to me, but good.
I love oysters and have a healthy disregard for my body. I’m an easy sell! I love the way oysters taste. I love that loving them means spending a lifetime tinkering in search of the perfect, ever-evolving saucy garnish. I love imagining the first time some very hungry person tried to eat a rock at the beach and was surprised to find A Little Treat inside. And I love the ritual borne of that first experience—especially how it morphed into battered and skewered idiocy served on a ruffled paper hot dog dish with a wee packet of Frank’s Red Hot sauce.
I deeply did not want to be disappointed. But we know that’s not how things went.
Hear me when I say this: Do not get the oysters at the Minnesota State Fair.
(Those little crab cakes are pretty decent, though.)
