It’s a hot, sticky afternoon in early July as we head into hipster Ukrainian Village cocktail den Sportsman’s Club, bound for the back patio, where a sizable crowd has gathered despite intermittent downpours. There, a small assemblage of local chefs and wine pros dish up freshly shucked New Zealand and Rhode Island oysters and paper bowls of Laotian-style boiled shrimp—in view of their unofficial mascot, a red Royal Enfield motorcycle.
This is Motorshucker, Chicago’s traveling oyster bar. Born in 2021 out of Mico Hillyard’s and Kat Dennis’s shared love of vintage bikes and bivalves, this pop-up business—also composed of partners Cubby Dimling and Jamie Davis—now has standing gigs at Sportsman’s, Easy Does It, The Charleston and Ludlow Liquors, and is doling out its Southeast Asian-spiced fried peanuts and potato chips strewn with creme fraiche and caviar at restaurant takeovers and events like Third Coast Soif and the forthcoming Pitchfork Music Festival.
“We started during Covid, partly because we couldn’t find any oysters through restaurants being closed,” Hillyard says. “We were sourcing from a family friend’s farm, Fisher Island Oyster Farm in the Long Island Sound, hanging out, shucking them in the park. Around the same time Kat and I started working on motorcycles—we thought this would be a nice way to combine the two and bring them around town to people.”
For their first unofficial event—undertaken mainly to keep funding their passions—Dennis and Hillyard rolled up to Diversey Wine on their vintage motorcycle, bearing a Yeti backpack full of oysters that they shucked right off the bike. Thanks to the city’s thriving pop-up culture—which was supercharged during the pandemic—word spread quickly, and their roving bike operation soon blossomed into a full-on mobile restaurant.
“Last summer we did a full bar takeover at Way Out on Armitage and that was the first time that showed us, holy crap, there’s much more here than we realized,” Hillyard says. In November, they brought on Davis to help with menu development, and Dimling joined in April to further formalize operations.
We landlocked Chicagoans often associate scallop crudo and mignonette-dressed oysters with special-occasion, white tablecloth dining. But Motorshucker delivers refreshingly dressed-down vibes with its upmarket product. Oysters fetch between $4 and $6 apiece and typically $55 per dozen; shrimp boils cost $22 per half pound and $38 per pound; and disco chips cost $16. Product is shipped overnight straight from the source, be it Canada’s Northumberland Strait or Coromandel, New Zealand.
“Logistically, it is a little tricky, but it’s lovely to know exactly when the fish are out of the water and the philosophy of the people behind it,” Dennis says. It helps that the crew has long-established relationships with high-end purveyors like Regalis to aid with sourcing, and that they recently secured a commercial kitchen space at Guild Row, which receives and stores the product until they prep and pack it up for events.
In typical Chicago summer fashion, the clouds unload on Sportsman’s patio moments after Hillyard deposits our tray of cucumbery Coromandel and unctuous, mineral Sex on the Bay oysters with Chardonnay mignonette, alongside Davis’s tangy, salty disco chips.
“Save those chips!” I cry, as we and the rest of the crowd hurry to the covered communal tables lining the patio. Said chips are house made, of course, with (also house-made) creme fraiche, trout roe, shaved bottarga and a mess of torn herbs.
“They look like caviar nachos,” Davis says. “It’s rare that we sell them to somebody at an event and they don't get them again next time.”
We suck the heads off Davis’s succulent prawns, which are redolent of lime leaf, lemongrass, and coconut milk, and we saw through garlicky sausages with plastic silverware while knocking back condensation-beaded Miller High Lifes.
“It sort of feels like we’re in New Orleans, doesn’t it?” asks Dimling, ducking under the awning for a break from the rain.
The energy among this foursome is relaxed and joyful, which is as important to them as their sourcing practices. It’s for this reason they aim to keep this venture semi-nomadic and on their terms, expanding mainly through collaboration. For now they have no plans for a brick-and-mortar space, citing exorbitant fixed costs and lingering disillusionment with the hospitality industry.
“We’re figuring out how we want our lifestyles to be built and what Motorshucker looks like behind that,” Dennis says.
After all, it’s no small task to schlep and shuck hundreds of oysters, keeping the delicate meat intact and free of shell bits. Dimling admits they’re the slowest shucker of the group, with the other three averaging up to 20 per minute.
“Maybe we should have a little contest,” Dennis says, half joking.
With Pitchfork on the horizon (which is expecting some 60,000 attendees), Motorshucker is ready to test its limits. With that, Dennis issues a challenge to Chicagoans to up our oyster intake from the current paltry average of a half-dozen apiece.
“Chicago can definitely push us a little more,” she says. “There are events on the East Coast where people are having 24 oysters each.”
Get slurping, Chicago.
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