Sara Essex Bradley for The New York Times
Oysters at Up the Creek Raw Bar.
I should've known this would happen: oyster withdrawal. More than 24 hours had passed since my last dozen. My stomach was making fearsome noises, and my mind was starting to slip. Was that a giant bottle of cocktail sauce in the distance? No, merely a water tower. Perhaps these car seat cushions were edible?
I arrived at Nick's Seafood Restaurant, a culinary miracle tucked away in the Florida Panhandle, just in time — a half-hour before closing. Frantically, I requested two dozen oysters and a beer. Moments later, I was slurping away madly, a moony grin on my face. I was going to make it.
The Florida Panhandle probably isn't the place that comes to mind when you think of culinary transcendence. In fact, gastronomically speaking, the region — sometimes referred to as the "Redneck Riviera" — is generally dismissed out of hand, despite its proximity to the Gulf of Mexico and, to a lesser degree, to the rich culinary traditions of the South.
The Panhandle — roughly 200 miles between the Alabama border to the west and Apalachee Bay (or what's called the Big Bend, where the coastline curves south toward Tampa) to the east — is a landscape known mostly for white sand beaches and blindingly turquoise surf. Drunk on a dizzying combination of gin and sea air, sun-red vacationers stumble idly along, mainlining crab balls at tourist traps like Fudpucker's and finding Jimmy Buffett suddenly tolerable.
But beyond the tourist grid lies a much gentler, far more appetizing Panhandle, largely thanks to a few old-line Florida seafood joints, beloved by a sensible, discerning local fan base. Reaching these places can require a bit of driving and navigational resolve, but your palate will thank you for it.
Those drives yield treasures: the Redneck Riviera includes some of the most stunning and untrammeled beachside expanses in America. Vast sugary carpets of beaches stretch into the horizon, uncrowded even in the thick of summer. With 9 aquatic preserves, 36 state parks and 2 major wildlife refuges, much of the coastline east of the town of Destin remains undeveloped.
Though my midwinter road trip had a culinary focus, I chose a route that promoted ample swimming and random, screeching pullovers to ogle alligators and short-billed dowitchers and giant 500-year-old saw palmettos; to hike and nap in the dunes; and to see whether the bear-crossing signs on the highways ever proved prophetic. My course took me roughly from Destin on U.S. 98 (the "Emerald Coast Parkway") to 30A and south to Grayton Beach, then down through Port St. Joe, around the horn to Apalachicola and up along St. George Sound to the leafy hamlet of Spring Creek.
Destin, located at the western tip of East Pass peninsula, bills itself as the "World's Luckiest Fishing Village." That might have been true once. Today it's the region's most overvisited city and not anywhere to stake a vacation claim, unless your thing is tattoo parlors, T-shirt emporiums and a pastel-stucco surf shop that recalls the gaudiness and grandeur of Graceland.
But one big selling point remains: Destin happens to sit across Choctawhatchee Bay from the town of Freeport, home to Nick's and its wonderful oysters. Aside from the flat-screen TV behind the bar, it feels permanently trapped in 1963, the year Frank and Hattie Nick opened it on the site of an old fish camp. There's a worn, laminate horseshoe bar and wood-paneled walls mounted with fish and ungulates. Shrimp dinners are $15.95, blue crab claws $11.95 per half-pound, and for $10.95, a "Fat Hattie Special" that will likely wind up on "Man v. Food." But oysters are the cornerstone. Plump, briny and magnificent, they came on a plastic cafeteria tray, laid out like a checkerboard, and are $10 a dozen (recently bumped up from $7).
About 90 percent of Florida oysters hail from Apalachicola Bay, which historically has been home to some of the most productive grounds in the country. But years of drought and overharvesting have devastated the stock, and until it recovers, places like Nick's have had to rely on oysters from other Gulf states, mainly Texas.
"These are a close second to Apalachicola oysters," Don Phaneuf, the barman and shucker at Nick's, assured me as he sucked down a few. "I could eat five dozen, easy."
I showed exceptional restraint by only eating two dozen, and a plate of fried green tomatoes, a bowl of excellent gumbo and two howitzers of beer.
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