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Heaven on the half-shell

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If you’re lucky when you’re traveling, every once in a while a little piece of heaven reaches up and smacks you in the face. That happened to my wife and me during a vacation on the Sonoma County coast recently. We’d headed out of Jenner, driving down Highway 1 toward Point Reyes, looking for someplace on Tomales Bay to eat oysters. On a recommendation from the folks at Hog Island Oyster Company (they only serve raw at the farm), we wound up at a little spot called the Marshall Store. It’s not much to look at from the outside — frankly, it looks half-abandoned except for the happy eaters sitting on the deck and at the string of rickety picnic tables stretched along the highway.

At first glance, the menu isn’t too impressive, either: oysters raw, barbecued and Rockefellered; clam chowder and a few sandwiches. But oh, what oysters. After warming up with some very good clam chowder, I ordered a dozen barbecued oysters. Out they came: brushed with garlic butter, slapped on the grill just long enough to firm up and finished with a smoky shot of house-made chipotle barbecue sauce. The balance of flavors was amazing. Inspired, I ordered another dozen raw. It was bliss at first slurp. The chilly, briny breeze blowing up off the bay was the perfect complement to the stunningly fresh oysters. In a long history of greedy oyster gobbling, these were some of the best ever. It was a total, seamless sensory experience. No mystery why: I noticed in the shallow water not 10 feet from where I was sitting a bundle of oysters waiting to be shucked. With a bottle of Sierra Nevada, it was as fine a meal as can be imagined.

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I wandered back into the store for a closer look. Besides those fabulous oysters, there was a good selection of Kermit Lynch wines (including half-bottles of Reverdy Sancerre, perfect for oysters), Cowgirl Creamery cheeses, Fatted Calf charcuterie and very good bread from a Point Reyes bakery called Brickmaiden. Virtually every food substance you would need for survival, right in this little store in the middle of nowhere. So I did what any sane eater would do: picked up a Cypress Grove Pee Wee Pyramid, a baguette, a duck terrine and a bottle of Joguet Chinon Rose for dinner. And then the next day we drove an hour back for lunch again.

Marshall Store, 19225 Highway 1, Marshall (about 20 minutes north of Point Reyes), (415) 663-1339. Open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

-- Russ Parsons

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