Oyster interest and harvests soar

A few days before Hurricane Sandy came barreling up the East Coast, I sat facing Cape Cod Bay with my infant son in my lap, swallowing oysters as fast as my husband could shuck them. It was a lovely afternoon—literally the calm before the storm. Still, I found myself growing fearful about how the oyster beds that have fed me since I was a child might fare.

Thankfully, prescient oystermen worked overtime before Sandy's arrival to get a supply onshore, and officials say they're hopeful the shellfish harvest will resume soon from Virginia to Connecticut—a huge relief, since prime season for oyster-eating is just beginning.

Like many of us, oysters respond to cooling temperatures by bulking up—building glycogen, a carbohydrate layer that hits the tongue like a scrumptious wave of sugar and fat. But that sweet spot is short-lived: Come midwinter, when water temperatures drop below 40 degrees, oysters begin to shrivel. So, half-shell seekers, seize the day!

And give thanks. Because not only is now the best time of year for oysters—it's also the best moment in modern memory. North America is in the midst of an oyster renaissance the likes of which has not been seen since the Gilded Age, when your average Joe could pop into a corner joint in New York or San Francisco and pay 6 cents to slurp as many as he could stomach.

By 1930, though, pollution and overharvesting led to steep price hikes, and oysters evolved from workingman's lunch to rich man's luxury. Jon Rowley, a Washington-based seafood consultant, recalls that as late as the early 1980s, only one restaurant in Seattle was shucking and serving fresh oysters. "The rest were just washing and reusing shells over and over again, filling them with oysters from a jar," he explained

Now, Seattle has emerged—like Venus, from the half-shell—as the hub of the thriving Northwest oyster scene, buoyed on one side by environmentally minded growers and on the other by a new generation of oyster bars serving up Kumamotos, Little Skookums and Baywater Sweets. Across the country, in the Chesapeake Bay, the explosion of interest has been at least as dramatic: Over the past five years, the number of oysters farmed in the region jumped from 5 to 23 million annually.

While there are five species consumed in North America, two—Crassostrea gigas, aka the Pacific oyster, and Crassostrea virginica, aka the Eastern oyster—are most common. But no one orders plain old "Pacific" or "Eastern" oysters anymore. Most have descriptive names (Moonstone, Sweet Petite) or geographic "appellations" (Wellfleet, Colville Bay). And just as oenophiles refer to a wine's terroir, oyster aficionados speak of merroir, the unique character an oyster takes on from the place in which it grows. Because an oyster pumps 40 to 50 gallonsof water a day, ambient minerals, algae and salinity levels profoundly effect its flavor profile.

In the Gulf of Mexico, abundant wild reefs sustained an old-school, working-class oyster culture for years. But recently, in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Ike and the BP oil spill (which wiped out more than half of Louisiana's oyster harvest), Gulf oystermen have been flirting with notions like merroir. A few years back, Robb Walsh, author of "Sex, Death & Oysters," and a proud Texan, happened on a 1915 map of Galveston Bay oyster beds, and it got him thinking. Though nowadays most oysters from the region are sold in mixed lots as generic "gulf oysters," on Mr. Walsh's map the reefs were individually named. "I wondered if oysters were still being harvested in these places, and if we could taste the differences," he explained. "I mean, why couldn't the Gulf have appellation oysters, too?"

Mr. Walsh reached out to the companies who controlled the reefs and asked if they'd pull out site-specific samplings. Then he rounded up some of the country's biggest oyster fans to give the samples a try. "The bay is about 600 square miles," he said. "Spots closer to the Gulf get more saltwater and stronger currents, giving the oysters a frillier shell. As you move north, the water is more nutrient-rich, and that makes the oysters bigger and creamier."

Rowan Jacobsen, author of "A Geography of Oysters" and the website the Oyster Guide, has gleefully explored this newly charted territory. "Whereas your average—usually Louisiana—Gulf oyster can have a muddy bayou flavor," he explained, "Pepper Groves are intensely salty, with an almost astringent finish. And Point Aux Pins, grown in Alabama's Mobile Bay, have a sweet-salty umami note." It seems Mr. Jacobsen is not alone in embracing these appellations. "Boutique Gulf oysters may be outliers now," he said, "but they're not going to be for long."