When a couple of oyster lovers walked into Seaworthy, the new sustainable seafood restaurant and oyster bar in the CBD, recently and ordered some raw bivalves from the East Coast, Chef de Cuisine Daniel Causgrove found himself faced with an unexpected question: “Did you put salt on them?”
No, he had not.
“Those who are used to the traditional Gulf oyster might think the East Coast oysters are almost too salty,” Causgrove said. “But as I explained to them, that’s a bit of the Atlantic Ocean captured in there.”
Raw oysters, served naked, offer the exceptional opportunity to sample the diversity of the maritime world. Whereas traditional Gulf oysters generally are meaty, buttery and low-brine, oysters from the East Coast can be quite salty, while West Coast bivalves tend to be less briny, more creamy, with various umami flavors (funk, if you will).
Behind the bar at Seaworthy, nine different oysters are sorted into yellow baskets: three from the Gulf, four from the East Coast (actually, they’re all from Massachusetts) and two from the West Coast. In a market where there always was an abundance of oysters, but usually of one kind (like your standard P & J oyster), Seaworthy joins a growing group of local restaurants serving boutique oysters from across the United States as well as from different areas in the Gulf.
“This is a very exciting time to be engaged in the culture of oysters,” Causgrove said. “Especially on the Gulf Coast. When we were developing this restaurant, we took great care to make personal contacts with the producers in Louisiana and Alabama. These oyster farmers are not harvesting and selling into a cooperative or a dock that sets the price—into this one, big oyster lot that’s then distributed in New Orleans. Instead, they create a consistent, delicious product at a better margin by selling directly to chefs.”
Some of these oyster farms include Murder Point in Alabama and Grand Isle in Caminada Bay, Louisiana. There, oysters are grown in cages in areas with saltier water, off-bottom and protected from predators. These farmed oysters are “tumbled,” which means the cages are shaken at low tide to break up clusters and smoothen edges, forcing the oysters to develop deeper cups with more room for meat.
“The reason Louisiana didn’t move towards off-bottom culture in the past is that the environment already is so good for growing wild oysters,” Causgrove explains. “There was always this incredible abundance. But with the recent challenges of coastal erosion and oil spills in the Gulf, some of the oyster leases just weren’t producing as well, so many moved to farming.”
Curious Oyster Company at Dryades Public Market on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard has a rotating cast of both farmed and “wild” (albeit still cultivated) oysters on offer, usually four to six at any given time, including the Murder Points and Grand Isles.
“We try to have a good representation from the Gulf, including your typical Area 3 from St. Bernard Parish and also the Point aux Pins,” manager Graham Stubbs said. “I love it when people come in here, ‘I’ll just have whatever,’ and I’ll go, ‘We’ll do Grand Isles and Murder Points; it’ll be like a Gulf Battle Royale.’”
Stubbs has been with Curious Oyster Company since April, having recently moved here with his wife. Just how different Gulf oysters can taste came as a surprise: “I wasn’t familiar. I knew how great and grand oyster production had been in the Pacific Northwest and in the Chesapeake Bay area and Long Island, New York, but that Louisiana is producing more of these boutique-style oysters that are grown off-bottom was new to me—as it is to some folks who are even from New Orleans—that this is going on. It’s a wonderful addition to the local oyster business. With so much complexity in flavor, these oysters compete with the best oysters in the country.”
Oysters are a representation of their geography, and each oyster carries what’s essentially a fingerprint in the way they look and taste, with flavors changing from area to area. Is the water moving fast? Is it deep and dark, cold or warm? Is there brackish water coming in? Are there rivers nearby? The variables are endless.
To Stubbs, the sheer size of the traditional Gulf oyster was intimidating at first. “Frankly, I don’t know how some people are not intimidated,” he said. “I’ve had oysters as big as chicken breasts, and I’ve seen customers cut them into thirds with a fork and knife.”
Louisiana is unique in that oysters, while delicious, were never considered a delicacy reserved for those with deep pockets.
As a food, oysters have crossed socioeconomic boundaries, available to everyone—as Oysters Rockefeller at Antoine’s, or as fried oyster po-boys from the neighborhood corner store.
With the new boutique oysters come higher profits for farmers, certainly, but also higher prices for customers. At Seaworthy, the Navy Cove oysters from Fort Morgan, Alabama cost $3 each on the half-shell, and it’s the same for the Massacre Island oysters from nearby Dauphin Island.
“When you can get 50 cents or 1 dollar for an oyster, compared to selling 10 for that price, you understand why some are moving towards a hatchery system,” Dr. Earl Melancon, Jr., Distinguished Service Professor of Biological Sciences at Nicholls State University working with oysters said. “This is intensive aquaculture, but still less than 10 percent of the oyster business in the Gulf, which relies on private oyster leases and wild harvest off of public grounds where it’s first-come first-get.”
A recent innovation in oyster farming is the creation of a triploid as opposed to a diploid oyster. The triploid has three chromosome sets instead of two in each cell, rendering it sterile—an oyster that never spawns. This is why some farmed oysters, such as the Murder Point oyster, are consistent throughout the year, even in the summer. Diploid oysters lose about two-thirds of their meat content and become thin and watery after spawning, whereas triploid oysters grow faster and thus can be harvested sooner. In France, the triploid is known as l’huître des quatre saisons—the four-season oyster.
So is this why it’s now possible to eat raw oysters during the summer, in months without an “r” (May, June, July and August)? Yes, and no, said Dr. Melancon: “You never did have to stop eating oysters in the summer. But before we had refrigeration on boats and trucks, oysters would die on the boat or in the sack at the shop. It’s refrigeration that allows us to now source oysters from all over the country, year round.”
Kerry Heffernan, Executive Chef at Seaworthy (and at Grand Banks, New York) is familiar with the risks of relying on a multitude of shipping connections.
“For us, we especially have to make sure the airport connections are tight,” he said. “You can’t serve raw oysters from across the country if you don’t have a reliable shipping chain.”
Of course, his personal favorites are hyperlocal—he grows them himself. “I have a house in Sag Harbor where I grow them under my dock,” he said. “I’m part of an oyster club where I get babies and it takes me about three years to get a mature, edible oyster because I have low flow in my cove. I eat mine raw, with nothing on them.”
Nobody seems to know exactly how it came to be in America that raw oysters often are served with ketchup and horseradish (as “cocktail sauce”) on a salty cracker, which further obfuscates the flavor.
“I don’t think anyone has done a study on cocktail sauce on raw oysters,” said Liz Williams, founder of the Southern Food & Beverage Museum. “I would think cocktail sauce was something associated with cold seafood [such as a shrimp cocktail] and that the ketchup-horseradish combination followed from the different vinegar sauces, the various mignonettes, that were traditionally used. It’s just a guess, but I think the vinegar thing came about to potentially counteract any bacteria that might be there, before we had proper refrigeration, and it would be the same with lemon juice.”
No matter how you like to eat them, there are more oysters on offer in New Orleans today than ever before. PJ Rosenberg, co-owner of the newly opened Bar Frances on Freret Street, plans to bring in oysters from all over the Southeast, from Texas to Virginia. He hopes to stay as local as possible while selecting oysters with great salinity and flavor to complement their food and drinks. But as far as varieties, Bar Frances will be taking it somewhat slow while they figure out what they and their customers like. They’ll start with just one.