Lowcountry Oyster Festival Guide

Every February, the fields at Boone Hall Plantation just outside Charleston get buried under some 45,000 pounds of steamed cluster oysters, and the Lowcountry Oyster Festival — running for four decades now and billed as the largest oyster festival in the world — turns into a single enormous shucking party. You buy a bucket by the market price, grab a shucking knife and a spot at a plywood table, and go to work; there’s a shucking contest, an oyster-eating contest for the truly committed, beer and wine, and a food court of Charleston restaurants for anyone who tires of prying shells. It’s the region’s food culture at its most communal — everybody hunched over a steaming pile, elbow to elbow.