It’s fine to introduce yourself and strike up a conversation with champion oyster shucker George Hastings while he’s shucking oysters on First Fridays at Hon Bar in Hampden.

Just don’t shake hands with him.

Wearing thick cotton gloves caked with juice and droppings, the two-time national champ stood at a table by the front door April 3. There, on many first Fridays of the month, and every Friday for the past month,
Hastings has spent several hours prying open oyster shells with a small, sharp oyster knife and serving them six to a plate, $3 per serving, to a long, patient line of happy-hour customers.

“I shake hands like this,” he said, touching elbows.

This is how Hastings, 54, a retired Maryland State Highway Administration engineer and now a highway consultant, spends many a weekend — not just at Hon Bar, but at bars, banquets, wedding receptions, oyster roasts, veterans halls and festivals around the country.

“I shuck,” he said. “And I jive. You can’t shuck without jiving a little bit.”

At Hon Bar, an extension of Cafe Hon on the Avenue, Hastings has been one of two featured shuckers on First Fridays for seven years. The other is restaurant consultant Paul Bartlett.

Typically, Hastings will shuck three boxes of oysters, 200 per box, from 5 p.m. until they’re gone, usually by 7:30 to 8 p.m.

His payment is $75 plus tips, and a glass of Guinness Stout on the house.

The crowds love him.

“Great oysters, great prices — you can’t beat it,” said Howard Ehrenfeld, owner of a photography studio nearby. “We look for things to do on Friday nights.”

Of course, Hastings’ reputation precedes him. He was as big a draw last Friday as the plump Choptank River oysters he served with cocktail sauce, horseradish and lemon.

In 1999 and 2003, Hastings, a southwest Baltimore native who now lives in Severna Park, won the U.S. National Oyster Shucking Championships at the St. Mary’s County Oyster Festival. In 2003, he shucked 24 oysters in 3 minutes, 11 seconds.

Each victory earned him a trip the following year to the world championships at the Galway International Oyster Festival in Ireland.

In 2000, he was runner-up in Galway, and in 2004 he finished in sixth place. He said he was actually faster in 2004 than in 2000, “but so was everybody else.”

He also competes in competitions nationwide, some of which pay several thousand dollars in prize money. He took second last year at the Boston Seafood Show, he said.

And Hastings gets invited to events such as a recent oyster festival in St. Louis, Mo., where he was one of 12 shuckers, six from the East Coast, six from the West Coast.

“Have knife, will travel,” he said.

It’s a busy life for a married man, but he said his wife, Vicki, doesn’t seem to mind.

“Sometimes she goes with me,” he said.

In Baltimore, where Hastings learned how to shuck 35 years ago from a family friend whose daughter he dated, he is legendary.

“He’s one of the best shuckers in the country and we have him at the Hon Bar,” said Denise Whiting, who owns the Hon Bar and Cafe Hon. “He’s a celebrity when he comes in here. He’s doing what he does.”

And for customers, “There’s a wow factor,” Whiting said.

Hastings lost the Baltimore Rotary Club’s annual shucking contest only once in recent years, according to past club president (and Hon Bar patron) Jake Slagle.

Usually, a Hastings victory is “a foregone conclusion,” Slagle said.

“Baltimore has a lot of fine shuckers,” Hastings said. He has an aw-shucks reaction to his success, ascribing it to “a little bit of luck and some skill.”

But he points out that there’s an oyster shuckers’ Hall of Fame, at Shaw’s Oyster Bar and Crab House in Chicago.

“I’m not in yet,” he said. “I’m aspiring to be there.”

In the meantime, he’s content to bask in kudos from customers such as Rotunda mall office worker Liz Kocik, who came to Hon Bar with several co-workers for “oysters and beer,” or Kathy Sabatier and Rick Funkhouser, of Patterson Park.

“It’s on our calendar,” said Sabatier, a nurse.

Sure enough, all of the oysters were gone by 8 p.m. Hastings stepped outside for a cigarette. When he returned, his table the table was bare, except for something that wasn’t there before — a tall, cold glass of Guinness.

 “This is what I work for,” he said.

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