“THAT right there is a top-neck clam,” said a man sitting at the counter in Randazzo’s in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, about five minutes before noon on a weekday as the sun blazed down on Emmons Avenue outside. He was pointing at the fresh-shucked bivalve in front of him on an icy plate, perhaps 2 3/4 inches across the heavy span of its shell, its pink and orange flesh glistening in its own liquor.
There were three of us at the counter that morning, eating four dozen clams among us, strangers caught up in an age-old discussion about the Atlantic hard clam.
I was a few days into a run of serious clam eating. I was eating in clam bars, those casual drive-ins on the way to the beach. My survey would take me from boardwalk stands in Brooklyn to others near the estuaries and sandbanks of the South Shore of Long Island, down the blue-collar highways along which clam bars cluster, everywhere there is black mud at low tide, from New England south along the Atlantic shore.
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Photo by Michael Nagle for The New York Times