The Oyster King Will Take You on a Bivalve Safari

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The Oyster King Will Take You on a Bivalve Safari

At first glance, the Fanø Oyster King looks more like a character from Game of Thrones ready to pillage a small coastal village, but he’s revolutionizing the Danish oyster scene.

On a crisp and cool October morning near the Danish island of Fanø, royalty was pulling oysters out of the muddy banks.

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All photos by Kasper Fogh.

Wearing a brown leather apron with more buckles, bolts, and bling than a Game of Thrones wardrobe, the Fanø Oyster King guided us through the rippled seabed where the tidal water retreated to unveil enough Pacific oysters to feed an army. The king lined up glasses of sparkling wine, shucked the freshly-picked oysters, and garnished them with strawberry slices, a squeeze of lime juice, and ground black pepper. "I'm not sure why the strawberry combination works. It's just one of those delicious things. It's the same reason why a hot dog is one of the best things you can eat: you want the sweet, the sour, and the salty," he explained.

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READ MORE: There's a Danish Town Overrun with Giant Oysters

Jesper Danneberg Voss is a former recruitment consultant who relocated to the Danish west coast after living in Luxembourg for three decades. Nowadays, the self-styled "Fanø Oyster King" is a tour guide who dons his leather regalia and shucks oysters for a living.

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His home island, Fanø, is located in the Danish part of the Wadden Sea where the invasive pacific oysters have thrived since the mid-1990s, spawning freakishly large bivalve beasts. There is no commercial fishing of oysters in the area, so any dent in the stock comes from oyster-picking tours in winter. The tours require people to traverse through the mudflats in wellies and freeze their bollocks off, but the rewards include all the oysters they can possibly stuff into their bags and buckets.

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For Jesper, the oyster excursions needed another ingredient. "After a couple of years of doing the tours here, I thought there must be more to this than just going out and picking oysters, having a glass of wine, and then bye-bye."

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His oyster king attire certainly seems more fitting for a pillaging Viking than a nature guide. The leather apron has holsters for knives, Tabasco bottles, and pepper grinders. There are hooks around the waist to attach steel buckets for holding oysters, and a metal plaque on the front which spells out his moniker. Even without buckets of oysters hanging from his hips, the apron weighs more than 20 kilos. "It's heavy," Jesper explained, "but it feels great."

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The night before our safari on the Fanø mudbanks, Jesper set up a stall outside Sønderho Kro—a 300-year-old inn—where he made ceviche and barbecued oysters. He smeared one of the oysters with a generous spoonful of garlic butter and topped it with Parmesan cheese and cured ham (the grilled oyster had the texture and taste of a garlic snail); another oyster was combined with blue cheese to give it the beautiful umami funk of wild mushrooms.

But what makes the raw material—the pacific oysters from the Wadden Sea near Fanø—worth the muddy walk? "Mainly, it's because the taste is so pure and clean," said Jesper. "They live in relatively cold water with a heavy flow that provides plenty of food and algae so the oysters become firmer in the flesh. There is more bite. You get more oyster."

His first assignment as the Oyster King two years ago began at the wedding of Nino De Angelo, a German singer who got married on the beach of Fanø. Next year, when the island marks the 275th anniversary of trade independence, Jesper's hoping to serve his oysters to even more prominent guests, preferably the French-born Prince Consort of Denmark.

"It would be great if it was the prince who came here. Then he could meet a real king."