On the Half Shell

Low tide at the south end of Washington’s Puget Sound comes in the daylight hours during summer and reveals a sloping beach that resembles a crumbled sidewalk. On closer inspection, the sidewalk turns out to be hundreds of thousands of oysters lying in ragged clumps like something an earlier geologic era spit up on the beach.

These are oysters headed for the shucking shed and a second life in a jar. Even more valuable are the acres of bulging black pillowcase-like bags adrift on the beach. Inside are oysters growing one by one, as singles, and they are headed for beds of ice and white tablecloths somewhere in America. Welcome to life on the farm at Taylor Shellfish Farms, the company that grows the greatest number of species of oysters commercially in the world.

Of course, winter is the time that the oyster lover really longs for. The days shorten up and the nights get longer. The water becomes clear and cold, a crisp snap gets in the air and the oysters harden up and pack on their distinct sweetness. The daylight sky takes on a mother-of-pearl hue. It’s oyster weather. You can feel it on your skin. If your flavor memory is intact, you can taste it in your mouth.

This time of year, in this spot on Puget Sound, Taylor Shellfish harvest crews work the low tides by lantern-light, for all the low tides come at night when oysters are at their best. It’s this way in oyster waters up and down the Pacific Coast from Northern California up through Canada; Taylor Shellfish is not alone in this business.

Oyster bars continue to spring up all over, and it’s hard these days to hold on to your white tablecloth restaurant status if there aren’t at least several oyster selections on the menu in season.

In parts of the country not normally associated with oyster culture--Southern California, for example--oysters are being consumed in Diamond Jim quantities. Consider the 1,000 dozen oysters a week that flow through the restaurants of the University Restaurant Group, among them downtown L.A.’s Water Grill, Santa Monica’s Ocean Avenue Seafood, Pasadena’s Clearwater Seafood and Long Beach’s King’s Fish House.

It wasn’t always like this. Twenty years ago, Taylor Shellfish and most other West Coast outfits like it concentrated on the meat business: shucked oysters in the jar. Very traditional.

The half-shell business was something imported from the East Coast, and prices were nowhere near what half-shell oysters get today. But all that changed when marine biologists, visionary entrepreneurs and oyster-loving foodies all found themselves bobbing around in the same boat.

Chief among the oyster pioneers was Bill Webb. Today his Westcott Bay Pacific oysters and Westcott Bay Flats, raised in 4,000 lantern nets on 27 acres of water, are shipped to Los Angeles and New York and as far as Hong Kong.

Twenty years ago, however, people thought Webb was a little cuckoo when he packed it in as a biology teacher and school headmaster and “retired” from California’s Santa Ynez Valley to the backwaters of Westcott Bay on Washington’s San Juan Island to tinker with this idea he had about aquaculture. He wanted to apply a cultivation model to the sea where only the hunter-gatherer had been before.

He and his wife, Doree, had the right chunk of waterfront property, with a long dock stretching out into Westcott Bay. The trick would be coming up with the right crop.

He considered importing young lobsters from Maine and growing them in pens. But you have to feed lobsters the same way you have to feed penned salmon. And lobsters are cannibals; if one lobster in a pen gets sick, they all get sick. What Webb wanted was something as hassle-free as possible, something that would feed itself, drawing nutrition from the plankton-rich waters of Westcott Bay. The oyster was a natural.

Lots of people had been talking about aquaculture back then. And a lot of people had tried one thing or another and failed. At Westcott Bay, for example, Webb had been preceded by an underfunded marine biologist struggling with clams, oysters and a divorce. Of aquaculture in general, investors had become wary.

“I maintain aquaculture had such a bad reputation among the money people back then,” says Webb, 76, in a voice permanently fixed in enthusiasm mode, “because there had been so many screwballs involved in it.”

There was a time when more than one passing acquaintance would have whispered that Webb could count himself among the bigger screwballs. What the man wanted to do, after all, was grow oysters specifically for the half-shell oyster market. Half-shell: as in slurping down freshly shucked raw oysters off the half shell.

We’re talking the mid-1970s here, a time when the finest restaurants in Seattle, a town that skated on a sterling seafood reputation more delusion than reality, served “oysters on the half shell” by plopping oyster meat removed from the quart jar onto shells that had been run through the dishwasher on countless occasions.

Other than imported Crassostrea virginica oysters from the East or South, the Pacific Northwest half-shell trade simply didn’t exist. Webb’s trouble would begin and end, wiseacre detractors would tell you, the day he discovered that the only market for half-shell oysters existed between his ears. As in a figment of his imagination.

What the naysayers didn’t consider was that good science could mean good business.

“Oyster hatcheries changed everything,” says seafood consultant Jon Rowley. At the time Webb was working out his half-shell oyster production in the early ‘80s, Rowley was teaching Seattle restaurants the basics of fresh fish and would later go on to set up oyster programs in restaurants all over the country.

“Natural spawning was always unpredictable among the imported oysters,” Rowley explains, “but the biologists figured out what it took to artificially stimulate oysters to release their eggs. The age of the hatchery and the nursery was upon us, asking to be exploited, and Bill Webb was right there with the vision and the facilities.”

If you increase the temperature of the water in which oysters live at a certain rate for a certain period of time and if you at the same time increase their nutrition, they will spawn. It’s that simple. It’s that complex. Everything has to be just right to produce viable oyster larvae, and the hatcheries are as devoted to growing very specific strains of algae to feed the larvae as they are to the oysters in question.

In the case of the Pacific oyster, known as the old clumper because for years it grew only in clusters, here’s what’s so delicious: At the moment that millions upon millions of larvae swimming around in tanks want to set on something, gluing themselves permanently into place on their road to becoming true oysters, the hatchery technician introduces to the water oyster shell ground finer than sand, so that each particle floating in the tank is no bigger than the point of a pin. There’s room for only one occupant in such a situation, hence the single oyster fit for the half-shell trade. Such single oyster seed production gave Webb the technological turbocharge he needed to grow the kinds of oysters he had in mind.

Then, of course, oysters in hand, he had to go to town and persuade restaurants that they wanted to buy his product at three times the cost of what they were paying for East Coast and Gulf Coast oysters. He had, fortunately enough, people like Rowley helping out along the way.

“When he started out,” Rowley recalls, “Bill Webb was likely the only guy in the Pacific Northwest growing oysters exclusively for the half-shell trade. ‘Gourmet’ was a big word in all the Westcott Bay Sea Farms literature back then, but Bill had the vision. He was growing his oysters for the M.F.K. Fishers of America who hadn’t forgotten. He drove his product to town, he knocked on doors and he preached the gospel. He spent as much time marketing as he did working with his oysters.

“Bill used a system of suspended lantern nets to grow his oysters. Randy Shuman, who came along after him, but out on the coast at Willipa Bay, was the first to use the French rack and bag method of growing single oysters. You see both methods today, as well as some others. A lot has changed. But Bill Webb’s a true pioneer.”

Webb settled on two primary oysters to grow in Westcott Bay, Pacifics (Crassostrea gigas) and the European flat (Ostrea edulis), which had been introduced to East Coast waters in the late 1940s but had never been grown before on the West Coast.

The European flats--which go by traditional names in France such as Belon and Marennes--takes three years to mature. This is probably why of the 2,000 dozen oysters Westcott Bay Sea Farms ships a week, only 600 dozen are flats and the waiting list for them is long.

In the beginning, Webb insisted on calling his flat oyster “Belon,” after the famous Ostrea edulis from the Belon River estuary in south Brittany. But this is where the naming of oysters gets tricky, and this is where Rowley gets his back up. All the time Webb was working the water and banging on doors, Rowley was working the restaurant side, drawing on the passion for oysters that grew out his trips to France, training restaurant staffs in the fine points of presentation, gastronomy, culture and tradition of the oyster.

“For 2,000 years an oyster has gotten its name from the bay it comes from because of distinctive flavor characteristics,” Rowley says. “That’s a far cry from some snappy, yuppie name that looks good in print. So I work to maintain that conservative tradition on restaurant menus.”

Webb was taken aback when his “Belon” showed up on Rowley-designed restaurant menus as “Westcott Flats.” But of all the oysters, edulis is most sensitive to its growing location and gives up distinctive taste differences. If everyone growing flat oysters called them Belons, you’d never know the “where” of an oyster. You’d never develop a loyalty to something you like.

Along with the hatchery technology came the trade in oyster seed. There are now nurseries that raise oysters to a certain size before shipping them to the growers. For instance, Michael Watchorn and John Finger of Hog Island Oyster Co. in Tomales Bay--they were to San Francisco’s oyster scene much what Webb was to Seattle’s--buy their flat oyster seed from Westcott Bay Sea Farms and “plant” it in Tomales Bay.

In the intervening years, small “farms” have popped up all over the place, up and down the coast, serving a relentlessly increasing trade in half-shell oysters. A lot of these small operators have come and gone, others have paid their bills and made it to the next level. Still others--Taylor Shellfish Farms comes to mind--are testing waters never known before.

When Webb started his operation, Taylor Shellfish Farms in the south end of Puget Sound was already three generations old, going on four. It was a shucked meat operation. But there was a canny mix of old experience and youthful enthusiasm at Taylor, and the company adopted the new technology with great success.

Among its most recent accomplishments is the West Coast cultivation of the Eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica. Taylor originally brought the virginica West after World War II in an attempt at transplanting that failed. But some of those oysters didn’t die. Taylor has been able to condition the virginica oysters in its hatchery and produce viable seed to be grown into oysters for the half-shell market. (A ban on importing stock from the East Coast is still in effect; growing virginica from seed already in West Coast waters is the only way to start virginica production on this coast.) The results will be marketed this year for the first time. Tomales Bay’s Hog Island Shellfish Farm will also grow virginica and will soon bring them to market.

Where Webb favored the hanging lantern net technique for growing his oysters, Taylor uses heavy mesh bags on the beach for its. Which is best? It depends. Every oyster and every location is a little different; even when science provides many answers, nature with its changing tides and prevailing winds provides a few of its own.