It’s Christmas, so this must be an oyster I see before me. A craggy shell lined with slimy green mucous membrane. The things we love to eat. Oyster-insatiable parents introduced me to oysters and without their enthusiasm would I have embraced them? I certainly wouldn’t have believed the oyster could be such an
astonishing compendium of tastes, running the gamut from iron ore to melon to fishscales.
The oyster optic may assault an eater’s sensibility but as revelatory taste follows revelatory taste, addiction grips. That’s why I can’t stop eating the gin-and-bitters Totten Tigers at the Starfish Oyster Bed and Grill in downtown Toronto. The reason for oysters’ protean taste is simple if a little off-putting. Like all our natural food, the oyster will taste of what it’s just eaten.

Last thing oysters often eat along a busy shore is human waste. The oyster is the Brita of the ocean, restoring a pristine sea. As I recycled my mother’s ashes in the ocean I couldn’t help wondering how they would affect the taste of local oysters.

Mmm, the Fines de Claire is stainless steel and smells of eau de mer, that cocktail of chemicals, minerals, salt and rotting life. Like many people I am ambivalent about eau de mer: I am drawn ineluctably to the ocean, our ancestral womb, yet repelled by such intimacy, the sickly smell of drying seaweed, the remnants of dead fish, and not least by its smell, the smell of the poisonous red tide of plankton as fishy as the smell of a woman menstruating.

This brings me to the fish bone I have to pick with Amy Pataki, the Toronto Star restaurant critic. In three recent consecutive weeks, she has accused restaurants of serving smelly fish, the suggestion being that the fish was somehow “off.” About Didier she wrote, “A pairing of marinated salmon and king crab is decidedly pongy, while the whiff emanating from hand-cut fish tartar …”

About Aoyama Sushi: “Something is wrong. The tuna is fishy tonight and uni is as pungent as Parmesan.” She found the seafood salad at Big Ragu“whiffy.” Back in June, she made her most startling observation at C5: “Sadly, I can smell the wild bass delivered two tables over and both the sea urchin and the scallops ... fail the freshness test.” …”

Now it’s one thing to attack the chef, the waiters, the busboys, the decor,the noise, your significant other, even your fellow patrons, but to suggest a restaurant is serving fish that is less than fresh, without having challenged the restaurant manager in situ, is dirty pool.

And this can be a serious problem for a restaurant — particularly in an inland city like Toronto that has to import fish from oceans hundreds,thousands of miles away and jealously guards its reputation for serving excellent fresh fish. It was that reputation that helped defeat the city’s health department plan to fresh raw fish, so essential to sushi. Spoiled fish can make you ill.

It beggars credulity to accept that three restaurants in a row served bad fish. But no way to refute it — the evidence has been eaten.

I have to believe that Pataki sincerely thought something was wrong — although if she really believed it why did she give Aoyama Sushi three stars?

I think she simply doesn’t like eau de mer with its stink of decay.

Lots of people feel the same way and that’s why tasteless farmed Tilapia is so popular.

Now Starfish’s Patrick McMurray joins the conversation. Toronto likes its fish bland. His bestselling oyster is the mild, eelgrassy Malpeque. I love the intense complexity of chunky Kumamato but a friend thinks its too fishy. Only 10 percent of Starfish customers go for the big briny Belon, flinty, an undertone of garlic. I suspect the brazenly fishy taste of the oily Blue Fish, the brusquely earthy sardine needs to be cultivated the way a taste for “stinky” cheeses like the raw milk Bries and Epoisses had to be.

Patrick, whose essential guide Consider the Oyster is just out, has explored the idiosyncrasies of fish taste from faint to pungent depending on the fish’s diet and the time it’s been out of the water. (Some fish, incidentally, shouldn’t be eaten fresh. A skate smells of urine for a day or two.) Uni, a fish’s gonads, tastes noticeably different, rather sweetish, straight from the sea than its more assertive self 24 hours later. Both are equally safe. Patrick, just back from Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market, describes a fatty cut of dark purple tuna beloved by the Japanese but not to our taste.

I’m now gulping a tiny coppery, mushroomy Olympia as I ponder other reasons for the Starperson’s fishphobia.

She may be a supertaster, someone with extra tastebuds. If you inspect your tongue in the mirror, you will see little bumps, tastebuds on it. Too many can distort the taste of food.

Or maybe Pataki’s anosmiac – she has blind spots about certain foods.

All she has to say is she doesn’t like fishy fish.

I filter Starfish itself as I slap the inside of my cheeks with a Galway Flats, iron filings, seashell, Irish whiskey. Authentic all right, smells fishy and Guinnessy. A supple dish of creamy mussels with frites, a couple of seared “dry” scallops are a nice complement to the splendid oysters. Wines by the glass no match for the food.

The décor is Spartan but this is after all a temple. It’s noisy because oysters so energize eaters that they tend to talk loudly. None of this matters. I haven’t come to Starfish to bond with anyone – except the oyster.

***Starfish Oyster Bed and Grill, 100 Adelaide W. 366-STAR416-366-STAR (7827) 416-366-STAR (7827)
416-366-STAR. No wheelchairs.. V Loud.

Dinner for two: Food plus tax: $95