June 6, 1980 Gusto Nightlife feature: Clam stands

A taste of the good life 45 years ago.

June 6, 1980

Clam stands

Going out for clams is the kind of warm weather adventure that's easy to find accomplices for. Few can resist the vision of a dozen of the meaty little bivalve mollusks glistening expectantly on the half shell, waiting for that final piquant dash of lemon or vinegar or hot sauce. If not raw, then how about steamed with drawn butter, maybe with some corn on the cob and a piping hot cup of clam broth. To wash it all down, a gang of ice cold beer. Now that's summertime eating. And clams, for some reason, taste better when you eat them outdoors.

In Buffalo, classic clam-eating country is the West Side. Not so long ago, the old-timers will tell you, the West Side had a clam stand on every corner, or so it seemed. Nowadays, you can count the West Side clam stands on the fingers of one hand.

Some say it was inflation that did in the others. A generation ago, a dozen freshly-cut cherrystones would set you back a mere 60 cents. Since the last price hike in 1975, the going rate has been ranging from $3.50 to $4. Some say it was the health department, with all those regulations about sinks and dishwashing facilities in the outdoor stands. And some say it was just a matter of changing tastes and changing times. The old clam stands closed one by one and in their place we got taco factories and chicken wing emporiums.

For the first stage of this expedition, we begin with what's reputed to be the oldest clam stand on the West Side. Scotty's at Busti and Jersey has been a bar since 1907 and its outdoor clam stand dates back at least 30 years. The current proprietor, Tony LaBarbara, assistant superintendent at the city incinerator on Squaw Island, is the son-in-law of the place's namesake, Scotty Pignataro. In the four years LaBarbara has been in charge, he's completely remodeled the bar and dining room in neat modern wood paneling.

At Scotty's we discover the first axiom of clam standing – clam lovers only come out at night. Since this is early afternoon, the operation hasn't really kicked into gear. The kitchen, with its lengthy menu of Italian delights, would not be open until dinnertime.

As for the clams, they usually get started around 4 p.m. But all is not lost. If we want a dozen or two on the half shell, well, that can be arranged. In next to no time they're in front of us, along with the usual trinity of clam condiments in squeeze bottles – the vinegar, the ketchup and the hot sauce. At Scotty's, they make their own high-potency cocktail sauce and it gives the clams a marvelously slow, spicy glow all the way down. For a chaser, Canadian ale at 90 cents a bottle. And plenty of napkins. The second axiom of clam standing – clams can be drippy.

Unlike most places, Scotty's features fresh clams the year round. This weekend, the weekend of the Allentown Art Festival, expect to find a mob there. People from halfway across the country have been known to stop at Scotty's. The usual trade is regulars from the neighborhood, horseplayers homeward bound from the racetracks and folks who've just crossed the Peace Bridge.

Among them are a surprisingly large number of Canadians, some of whom pick up an extra dozen live clams to carry back across the bridge. Outstanding clams apparently are rarer than hen's teeth in Canada.

Yes, clams are alive until just before you eat them, like lobsters. They die when they're cut open. What's tricky is keeping them fresh up to that fateful moment. They have to be washed to get the sand out of them and then they should be put on ice. They seem to feed on the ice cubes, Tony LaBarbara says when we catch up with him later.

"You can't go and put them in the refrigerator," he explains. "They go stale. You can tell a bad clam pretty quick. It has a hollow sound when you open it. It looks flat too. It's not nice and firm and juicy. And boy, can you smell it!"

Scotty's gets its clams from the John G. Trautwein Fish Co. on Grider Street, as do many of the other clam stands. Ron Adler, a manager there, blames prices for the decline in the clam stand business.

"They go from $30, $35 a bag in early May to $50 a bag by the end of the summer," he says. "There's around 240 to a bag – 20 dozen. The big clams come from Chincoteague, Va., and the cherrystones, the Little Necks, come from Patchogue, L.I."

"If it wasn't for Buddy, we wouldn't have a clam stand," says Joseph Darone, one of the brothers who run Darone's Restaurant at Niagara and Fargo.

He's talking about Buddy Bender, Buffalo's champion clam cutter, who's been at it since 1947. "All seafood is very, very touchy, you know, and clams are the touchiest. But Buddy really knows his clams. He's an excellent cutter. He leaves no chips. And he keeps them all at just the right temperature. They're like his babies."

Bender used to cut clams for the Turf Club, opposite Scotty's, but after that place was closed and demolished, the Darones brought him in last year to reopen their stand, which had laid dormant since the late '60s. The season runs from May 1 to the end of September. The rest of the year Bender takes care of his property, a pair of adjacent apartment houses – six units altogether.

The clams all seem to fall right open for Bender. It's one pass of the knife to open the shell and then a second run of the blade to detach the underside. Like at Scotty's, you can order the small ones, the cherrystones, or the large ones, which here are as big as your hand. The hot sauce is his own recipe, a touch hotter than Scotty's. The broth is pale and slightly briny, with a hint of butter. My associate says it tastes like the sea smells.

Up Niagara Street at a neighborhood bar-restaurant called the Casa DiSalvo, it looks like they've got a clam stand, but the barmaid informs us otherwise.

"It's for rent," she says. "You want to rent it? The owner's right over there. Go talk to him."

To find a working clam stand, it's necessary to go a block further up Niagara to Andy's Restaurant, between Auburn and Lafayette. Andy's is a lot bigger inside than it looks from the outside. A cozy, old-fashioned two-room place with lots of tables, it also does a brisk food business.

We choose a table near the bar and fragrant clouds of seafood steam waft in at us from the back of the clam stand. At Andy's, the beer supply is limited to bottles of low-cal and three types of draft, and the hot sauce is uncut tabasco. The clams, however, are just right. Cold, clean and fresh.

That's the extent of the West Side clam stands, but there's a shirt-tail cousin at Military and Hinman, just south of Kenmore. Mario's clam stand is attached to the M and E Restaurant and both of them seem to do a fine trade at night, thanks to the Chevy plant and other factories nearby.

The bar watches the Yankees on cable TV, the back room is packed with couples out for sandwiches and beer and conversation, and the clam fanciers hang by the half-dozen off the counter outside. Mario's clams are fresh and tasty too, without any grit or shell, and the serving includes some large, some small. The broth and the hot sauce are uncannily similar to Bender's. And no wonder. Mario used to work for Bender.

Clam stands are not creatures of the suburbs, but one exception is attached to Old Man River, a hot dog stand at the edge of the Niagara River on Niagara Street in (the City of) Tonawanda. We try corn here – the first corn of the season, Florida corn – and it's done to just the right crunch. The broth is yellowish, more butter than the West Side variety. And hot sauce seems a lost art here. No beer either. But the clams don't suffer. Mid-sized and tender, they go down great.

Clams stands also used to dot Buffalo's East Side, but a check of the one at the Morrison Hotel on Bailey proves fruitless. The kitchen equipment lays abandoned in the empty stand while the Yankees rally on large-screen TV and the sound system churns out high-decibel Doobie Brothers for a youthful drinking crowd.

The sole survivor on the East Side appears to be Yesterdays South on East Delavan a couple blocks east of Bailey. A white hexagonal stand, it sits across the street from its parent tavern, Yesterdays North, and is one of those objects of neighborhood pride and affection. Here the broth is reminiscent of beachside clambakes – murky and salty. As for the other clam criteria, the shelling and the chilling, they're closer to West Side standards than beachside ones. Where Yesterdays South really shines is in the hot sauce department. It's tabasco, but more. No wonder the East Side is proud.

What's south of the city is left undetermined. Nobody seems to know of a place there, though Tony LaBarbara recalls one in West Seneca "near Orchard Park." LaBarbara used to run a stand in West Seneca himself, but closed it up when Scotty's beckoned.

"Most of the people seem to come to the West Side for clams," he says. "I don't know why, but this is where they taste the best."

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IN THE PHOTO: Buddy Becker, making his cuts. Photo by Buffalo News photographer Gail M. McGee.

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FOOTNOTE: Three weeks after this appeared, Vince M. Hynes of Hamburg wrote in to Gusto to say:

"As a South Towns entry, I give you Armondo's, just south of the Ford Plant and next to Snyder Tank on Route 5 in Hamburg. A long-time aficionado of the raw clam delicacy and a patron of Buddy Bender when he operated on Niagara Street in the late '50s and '60s as well as Scotty's, I feel that Armondo's is on a par with any of the West Side places that you mention."

These days, Scotty's is gone. Andy's, too. I think Darone's is now Marco's, which is a good place for Italian food, but no clams. Writers on Reddit recommend Marotto's on Delaware Avenue south of Sheridan Drive in the Town of Tonawanda and the River Grill, at the water's edge in the Town of Tonawanda. And clams can still be slurped outdoors at Old Man River. Emeri Krawczyk mentioned all three of them in her survey of clam joints in Gusto in the Buffalo News in May 2021. Top of the list on stepoutbuffalo.com is the patio at Fat Belly's Clam Bar, formerly the Hatch in Erie Basin Marina. Could be worth a shot once the weather warms up.