Ah, an Oyster-Lover's Delight by R. W. Apple Jr

Kilcolgan, Ireland - If you're willing to take the time to search and if you can resist the 'locals' determination to steer you into places where they would rather drape fishnets on the walls than cook, you can find, along most of the seacoasts of the world, honest houses with fresh fish and congenial company.

Galway Bay is like that. If you go into the big hotel in the town, you'll get a beautiful view of the bay, stretching away towards the Atlantic and North America, but you'll also get tough scallops in a plastic shell, covered with a glutinous cheese sauce, rimmed with library paste squeezed through a tube.

So don't go there. Turn off the main road from Shannon, as you head north up the verdant West Coast of Ireland, about 12 miles before you reach Galway, when you see the small sign advertising Moran's Oyster Cottage.

Moran's fishnets aren't much. But you'll find a real Irish cottage, 200 years old, with a real thatched roof and a real peat fire burning on the hearth, filling the tiny rooms with its special sweet aroma. You'll also find Martin Neylan, who is 19 years old, and his friend Willie Moran, 22, who is the sixth generation of his family to grow up in the harsh, blustery beauty of Kilcolgan.

It is a spot that ranks, in the memory of one exuberant eater with Sam's Grill in San Francisco, whose charcoal-grilled petrale instantly dispels any lingering temptation to return to Fisherman's Wharf, and with a joint on the beach in Nhamtrang, Vietnam, whose name is long since forgotten but whose lobsters are not, and with the Brasserie des Catalans on the corniche above Marseilles, whose bouillabaisse is the Platonic ideal of fish stew.

At Moran's, this is the menu. "Seafood Specialities: Galway Oysters, served with homemade brown bread, butter and Guinness/Smoked salmon/Mussel soup/Irish coffee." Serious students take some of each, though it is socially acceptable to rearrange the order of the first three items.

The oysters are quite simply the best that one fanatic - a man who has eaten Olympias in Seattle, Chincoteagues in Baltimore, Sydney Rock Oysters, Belons and Blue Points, Colchesters and Mobile Bays - ever put in his mouth. Fresh, plump, briny with none of that unappetisinhg greasiness that betrays the oyster that left its habitat forever two or three days earlier.

The oysters of Moran's usually reach the table within an hour of the time they are rated into baskets, and moments after Martin or Willie opens them. Which is something to watch.

The 21st Annual World Oyster Open Contest was held a few miles up the road in the village of Clarenbridge last September, and Martin came within a whisker of winning. He shucked 30 oysters in two minutes and 29 seconds, by far the best time, but he was penalised for having allowed bits of shell to fall into the oysters. The title went to Cornelius McKall from St. Mary's County, Md.

"'Our eye-sters," Martin Neylan explained in a rich accent that would pass unnoticed in South Boston, " come from our own beds. They're at the mouth of a little stream, where the water is two-thirds salt, one-third fresh. That's the ideal combination."

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