When you open a fresh oyster, you get a slurp of water, brought along in the shell. It tells you where it’s from. These days, around New Orleans, increasingly that water is telling a story of a changing oyster business, and new pleasures for us oyster lovers.
In just a few years, a different way of growing oysters has established a presence in Louisiana. It makes an oyster that looks different, with cleaner shells, and they taste different, one type from the next, reflecting where they’re grown and how they’re grown, with farmers having great control over their outcome.
They’re sometimes called off bottom oysters, because they’re grown from seed in enclosures that float on the surface, as opposed to oysters grown on reefs and raked up from the bottom.
Sometimes they’re called AOC oysters, for alternative oyster cultivation, or just cultivated oysters.
More restaurants and oyster bars are catching on. Two restaurants in particular have hung their hats on oyster variety: Pigeon & Whale, Uptown on Freret, and Sidecar, the casual patio bar in the Warehouse District, each might have a dozen of more different oyster types.
A choice of four varieties are more common, and becoming easier to find. Places like Fives on Jackson Square, Peche Seafood Grill, Seaworthy, the seafood market and cafe Porgy’s and even the old Riverbend bar Cooter Brown’s are good examples.
And now you can find them on the menus at Drago’s and Acme, two of the biggest names in the Louisiana oyster business.
This does all remain a boutique subset compared to the immense overall Louisiana oyster harvest.
But the oyster industry is contending with the environmental impacts of climate change, land loss and the coastal restoration projects aimed at blunting it all. Some see cultivated oysters as a way to adapt and diversify.
For oyster lovers the upshot can be an iced platter offering a one-plate tour of different Louisiana flavors, and perhaps a taste of the future.