Oysters, raw and in the rough

Photo credit: Ian McNulty

By Ian McNulty

For some, oysters have an appeal that goes beyond making a meal. Consider, for instance, the experience of Woody Ruiz. A former oyster shucker and now a festival food vendor, he’s still known to load up his 30-year-old Mercedes sedan with sacks of oysters, park somewhere strategic — near the Fair Grounds Race Course on Thanksgiving, say, or in the Marigny on Fat Tuesday — and proceed to shuck them directly from the car trunk for his friends and for strangers passing by.

“It’s kind of amazing the reaction you get with oysters,” Ruiz said. “It’s the feel, the look, the smell. I don’t think people associate oysters with food as much as with an experience. So you can sit there, outside, totally rustic, just opening raw oysters and handing them out and whip people into an oyster frenzy.”

Ruiz, with help from plenty of his friends, aims to do just that on a bigger scale this Sunday at the inaugural Freret Oyster Jam. Held outside the Freret Street Publiq House, you’ll find live music on stage from the New Orleans Suspects, Mardi Gras Indian Orchestra and (of course) Raw Oyster Cult. The NFL playoffs will be on TV. And, the way this party is shaping up, the food booths will be offering the makings for oyster overload.

Ruiz operates his Woody’s Fish Tacos stand at festivals and markets across the city. Instead of tapping restaurants to serve food for the Oyster Jam, he’s invited other food vendors from the festival circuit to participate. They’ll be selling a variety of cooked oyster dishes (grilled oysters, fried oyster tacos, oyster pasta) and other food. You can also add oysters to Ruiz’s (otherwise) vegan gumbo, and watch them poach in the hot roux, and there will be an oyster shooter station, for for gulping down booze and bivalve simultaneously.

But the focal point will be a tag-team raw bar, to be staffed by a coterie of shuckers recruited from local oyster bars for the party.

“It’s the raw oyster that gets people the most,” said Ruiz. “You could have food from the best chefs at your party, and if you had an oyster bar, too, that’s what everyone would be talking about the next day.”

Published in the New Orleans Advocate

How you like dem oysters?

Chefs get creative with our favorite bivalve

BY IAN MCNULTY

imcnulty@theadvocate.com

September 05, 2013

Photo: Scott Threlkeld, New Orleans Advocate

As Saints fans gear up for the season opener this weekend, black and gold will be everywhere. That includes on the raw oysters at Bourbon House in New Orleans.

The French Quarter seafood restaurant has always offered a topping of black bowfin caviar on its oysters. But for a new special that kicked off Thursday and continues throughout Saints season, the restaurant is serving them beside oysters topped with golden-hued catfish caviar as well.

This Saints-themed seafood special is just the latest example of creatively wrought raw oyster platters that move beyond traditional cocktail sauce and crackers. They’re adding new dimensions to the beloved local bivalve without burying the essence of the oyster under ketchup and horseradish.

“When I was growing up, my dad always told us it was a waste to cover a good steak with A-1 sauce,” said Bourbon House proprietor Dickie Brennan. “He’d say, ‘Taste it instead, taste what it’s really like.’ That’s how I feel about cocktail sauce on oysters, so we try to offer alternatives.”

These alternatives are stacking up around New Orleans-area restaurants. At the Little Gem Saloon, chef Miles Prescott’s raw glaceé oysters are topped with a tart slush of cranberry sorbet, while Restaurant R’evolution serves its oysters with an icy granita imbued with mellow cucumber and lemon flavors.

In Kenner, David Montes takes a simpler tact with raw oysters at his Mexican restaurants Chilangos Taqueria and Chilangos Seafood. The ostiónes Veracruz get a slice of fresh avocado, a spoonful of chunky pico de gallo and a squeeze of lime. Montes called this preparation a traditional Mexican beachfront snack, though washed down with a schooner of Dos Equis lager they made a great Williams Boulevard snack too.

One of the most elaborate raw oyster preparations turns up at Criollo, in the Hotel Montelone. The inspiration for Chef Joseph Maynard’s “oysters and pearls” appetizer was a dish of the same name at the renowned Napa Valley restaurant the French Laundry, though his rendition is no carbon copy. Maynard nests a fat, cold oyster in its shell between crisp mirliton slaw strung with sweet lump crabmeat and soft tapioca “pearls” spiked with Crystal hot sauce, plus a sprinkling of black caviar. The result is a cool, compelling combination of crisp and creamy textures and salty, spicy, marine-tinged flavors.

“There’s a lot going on in that dish, but our Gulf oysters are so big and plump they can stand up to all that,” said Maynard. “You can work with them and play around a bit.”

Like Criollo’s caviar, the eggs for Bourbon House’s black and gold oysters come from New Orleans-based Louisiana Caviar Co. The company’s black bowfin (a.k.a. choupique) caviar has found wide acceptance, though company founder John Burke said he’s only been marketing his catfish caviar for about a year, primarily to Louisiana chefs. Like the bowfin variety, he harvests the fish locally and prepares some batches with a touch of ghost pepper, adding a spicy bite.

“We call that caviar with a kick,” Burke said.

Beyond its potential to create a Saints-themed color scheme, the gold caviar makes a fine accompaniment to oysters. The eggs are larger and softer than the bowfin variety, and they taste milder and a bit earthier and creamier. If you find black caviar too intense, this catfish caviar might be more your speed. At Bourbon House, both the black and gold oysters are doused with a light mignonette sauce, made with shallots, Champagne, vinegar and Creole mustard, for a cumulative effect that adds exclamation points to the fresh, bracing pleasure of a raw oyster.

Of course black and gold oysters beg the question of a possible purple and gold combination, but Brennan hasn’t been able to source any purple fish eggs yet.

“But you know LSU fans will ask anyway,” said Brennan.

Study finds oysters oil-free

By Benjamin Alexander-Bloch, The Times-Picayune

Gulf of Mexico oysters consumed little, if any of the crude oil from the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill that spewed nearly half a million tons of crude oil into Gulf waters, according to a recent scientific paper. A study last year by University of New Orleans oyster biologist Thomas Soniat similarly found that oysters -- at known oil-exposed sites in Louisiana -- showed no contamination or apparent biological signs of exposure six months after the 2010 spill.
Since the oil spill, fishermen and consumers have been concerned about the status of the local fisheries, but, in terms of consumption, federal and state scientists have made clear that local seafood is safe to eat.

http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2012/12/gulf_of_mexico_oysters_consume.html

EnlargeDavid Grunfeld, The Times-PicayuneDAVID GRUNFELD / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE Capt. Pete Vujnovich and his son Pete lll and nephew Jeremy harvesting oysters aboard the oyster lugger Miss Eva in area 12 west of the Mississippi River, Tuesday May 18, 2010.Oyster Harvest gallery (21 photos)

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Oysters face another assault

New Orleans family oyster company sees only dark days ahead

Published: Sunday, May 15, 2011, 6:30 AM     Updated: Sunday, May 15, 2011, 12:11 PM

 By Brett Anderson, The Times-Picayune 

Al Sunseri is livid. It's not his usual disposition.

View full sizeDavid Grunfeld, The Times-PicayuneSal Sunseri Jr at his desk at P&J Oyster Company in New Orleans Monday April 24 2011

Last June, when Sunseri announced the BP oil spill was forcing his family's company, P&J Oyster Company, to cease regular business operations, his tone was measured. The move cost 13 of the company's employees their jobs -- everyone not named Sunseri -- leaving Al and his brother, Sal, to try to keep the business afloat.

Sunseri appeared calm even last fall. At the time, P&J's business had slowed to a trickle, a consequence of the state's decision to divert large amounts of freshwater into Louisiana's brackish coastal wetlands in an effort to keep the oil off shore. The diversions reduced the salinity of the waters where some of the state's most prized oysters are harvested, causing widespread oyster mortality that devastated areas where P&J, which has been processing and distributing Louisiana oysters for 135 years, sourced most of its products.

Related items

• New Orleans family oyster company devises new business model to stay alive (Part 1)
• P&J Oyster Co. update as oystering resumes

"I'm basically an optimistic guy," Al Sunseri said. "But now I'm mad."

Sunseri sat cross-legged on a couch in his French Quarter office. It was a few days before last month's anniversary of the Macondo oil well explosion. Despite mounting evidence that Louisiana's wetlands were less polluted by oil than feared, Sunseri's portfolio of worry and disgruntlement had gradually swelled since the well was capped last July. It has only gotten worse in the last week, as the Mississippi River has risen to levels that threaten to cause even more destruction to Louisiana's oyster supply.

Deep distrust of BP, claims process

Sunseri, like many in the Louisiana oyster business, doesn't believe Kenneth Feinberg's Gulf Coast Claims Facility has negotiated in good faith with oyster fishers, farmers and distributors. BP argues that it didn't authorize the freshwater diversions that share blame for the precipitous drop in Louisiana's oyster production in 2010 and therefore shouldn't be held responsible for the harm it caused the $360 million industry.

View full sizeDavid Grunfeld, The Times-Picayune'I'm basically an optimistic guy,' Al Sunseri says. 'But now I'm mad.'

The company's refusal to pay for a $15 million reseeding project to repair damaged oyster beds was fresh on Sunseri's mind as he moved from couch to desk in P&J's eerily quiet headquarters.

"They said they were going to make people whole," Sunseri said of BP. "We just recently received a check from them, and it was a pittance compared to what we've lost. They haven't done what they said. They're going to come up with any excuse, any reason to not come up with what we've lost."

Before the oil spill, P&J was almost exclusively dependent on oysters harvested in Louisiana. But now, the historically high river poses the latest in a dizzying series of obstacles that threatens the Sunseris' ability to remain New Orleans' go-to supplier of quality local oysters. The spike in uncertainty lends even more urgency to the questions they've been asking themselves for a year now:

When will damaged oyster beds return to health? Will there be enough fishers to harvest them when and if they do? Will out-of-state demand ever rebound? How large a portion of P&J's business has been lost forever?

'This is just one bad thing after another'

"I've been doing this for over 30 years," Al Sunseri said. "P&J has been through hurricanes, the Depression, world wars, all that, but this is just one bad thing after another. It's terrible."

And that was before the river started to rise.

View full sizeDavid Grunfeld, The Times-PicayuneSal Sunseri Jr. at his desk at P&J Oyster Company in New Orleans.

P&J's business is based on a reputation for quality built over generations. The Sunseris' involvement dates to the 1920s, when Alfred Sunseri -- grandfather to Al and Sal -- was hired by P&J's founders, John Popich and Joseph Jurisich.

The Sunseri family took sole possession of P&J in the 1970s, but the current owners see their work as a continuation of a project that began in the crucial early stages of New Orleans' culinary history. "The P&J Oyster Cookbook" makes a point, for instance, of mentioning that the company was around when Oysters Rockefeller was invented at Antoine's in the 1880s.

Rodney Fox, owner of R&A Oyster Co., a seafood supplier in Bayou La Batre, Ala., said his father, Kenny, has told him stories about P&J's founders.

"Back in the day, he said, 'If you were lucky enough, Mr. Jurisich and Mr. Popich would sell you oysters,'" Fox recalled. "When you speak of oysters, name recognition is really important, and Al and Sal have done a good job maintaining that. It's nothing for Al and Sal to go down to the docks and shake hands with the fishermen, just to say hello, even if they're not buying from them. That's how they stay abreast of what's going on in the industry."

Tenney Flynn, chef and co-owner of GW Fins, a French Quarter seafood restaurant not far from P&J headquarters, said he buys from P&J "partly out of habit and partly out of loyalty, which is based on the fact that they have the best oysters."

No more shucking

Today, the production facility that fronts the company's offices appears as it has for more than a year now: empty, save for the handful of part-time employees who help package and deliver oysters to the company's dwindling base of clients. The company has not returned to shucking. In the span of a couple of hours in April, Al Sunseri turned away two customers who had wandered in looking to buy oysters and countless others who called his cell and office phones looking for product.

Last fall, the Sunseris said P&J's distribution business had been cut to an eighth of what it was before the oil spill. They've since hired four part-time workers to help package oysters and drive the trucks. Sunseri declined to share specifics on the advice of his lawyer, who has filed a lawsuit against BP on P&J's behalf.

"I can't go into numbers," he said. "All I can say is (business) is substantially off. We're just trying to take care of our customers."

Doing so has been touch and go for more than a year now. The freshwater oyster kill-offs that followed the oil spill wreaked havoc on P&J's practice of sourcing oysters almost exclusively from areas they believe produce the highest quality.

Before the spill, Mitch Jurisich, an oyster fisher and supplier based in Empire who is no relation to P&J's co-founder, sold to P&J once a week. "We're kind of like winemakers," Jurisich said. "We don't harvest oysters before it's time." Jurisich has yet to resume supplying P&J since he stopped harvesting June 4, although he returned to the water April 19.

Around the same time P&J received a shipment of shell oysters from Copano Bay, just north of Corpus Christi, Texas. The company has a long history dealing in Texas oysters. During the months of November and December, when the demand for Gulf oysters is at its height, P&J used to rely on Texas for nearly half of its supply.

But in the 1990s, Sunseri said an increase in the number of New Orleans oyster bars increased demand for Louisiana oysters among P&J's customers. "When that happened, those customers demanded we only sell them Louisiana oysters," he said.

As the oil spill dried up the Sunseris' established sources for Louisiana oysters, they had to scramble for supplies from Texas to keep up with demand.

"Now our customers want to make sure that we have oysters for them, but these are oysters that they wouldn't buy before," Sunseri said as he handed over a shucked Copano Bay oyster, which was cool, mildly salty and about as big around as a satsuma. "They're beautiful oysters, but they're not the kind of oysters that I would regularly sell. They're too small. Our (regular) oysters would probably be between a half-inch and an inch larger than that."

The Sunseris have been able to source quality oysters from Louisiana, too. They insist the second annual Louisiana Oyster Festival slated for June 4 and 5 will feature nothing but local product.

But the impact of the spill on smaller farmers and fishers has rendered P&J's old business model of relying exclusively on regional oysters untenable.

More bad days ahead

And things are about to get worse. With the opening of the Bonne Carre and Morganza spillways, tons of freshwater will invade brackish waters where oysters thrive. Most of the reefs that help Louisiana produce 40 percent of the nation's crop are located along the southeastern corner of the coast from Lake Borgne to Vermilion Bay.

"We're very likely we're going to see more mortalities in our oyster beds," said Olivia Watkins, special adviser to the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries. Watkins declined to speculate on how much damage the freshwater would cause, but members of the Louisiana oyster industry are bracing for paralyzing losses.

"I think we're going to lose 50 percent of what's there," said Mike Voisin, owner of Motivatit Seafoods in Houma and a Louisiana Oyster Task Force board member.

The prediction is especially grim in light of the severity of oyster mortality stemming from the oil spill. Louisiana oyster production was down more than 55 percent in 2010 compared with 2009, according to Wildlife & Fisheries, dropping Louisiana behind Washington state as the country's leading domestic oyster producer. The level of damage Voisin and others fear would put local oyster production at 25 percent of what it was just over a year ago. "And that," according to Voisin, "would hold true for a couple of years."

That's the Sunseris' greatest concern.

"I'm 53 years old. I've already worked 32 years. I was hoping my son would be here," Al Sunseri said, referring to his 25-year-old son Blake, whose September departure from the company he blames on the oil spill.

"That's another reason I'm angry. My son has been in the hospital a couple of times because of complications with this whole thing, depression and all. He was being groomed to take over this thing like my grandfather did for my daddy and my daddy did for us," he said. "I don't think that's going to happen now."

Sunseri was sitting up on the couch. Glassy-eyed, he pointed toward an empty chair.

"That's Blake's desk," he said. "He would be the first one here in the morning after I got here. We'd do things together. I was teaching him all of the stuff he needed to do. Now I don't see him. I call him every day just to see what he's doing. Sometimes he doesn't answer."

•••••••

Brett Anderson can be reached at banderson@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3353. Read more dining features at nola.com/dining or nola.com/dining-guide. Follow him at twitter.com/BrettAndersonTP.

© 2011 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

Ode to an Oyster

Simon Hardeveld, a French sign painter who was featured in one my early 2007 blog posts, is still memorializing the dead with park art.

He built a shrine at the corner of Magazine and Jackson to Vera, a Katrina victim whose body lay unattended for days following the storm.

And now, he's erected a cross for the thousands (millions?) of doomed oysters lying on the Gulf floor beneath a liquid blanket of oil.

Other forms of activist public art include bus bench signs put up anonymously along Magazine Street, showing a baby crying for the Gulf Coast. She is our future - one that will be robbed of all the riches we've so enjoyed.

You can reach him at 504-524-8201

FDA to crack down on fresh oysters

It's not everywhere that the newspaper runs a headline like this one.

But as the Federal Department threatens to sterilize oysters, the region's seafood and restaurant industries have become alarmed.

This, from the Times-Picayune's editorial page:





THE FDA SHOULD GET OUT OF OUR GUMBO

By Editorial page staff, The Times-Picayune
October 28, 2009, 11:11PM

A Food and Drug Administration decision to impose draconian new rules on oysters harvested from the Gulf of Mexico could wreck Louisiana's $300 million-a-year industry and restrict the diets of raw oyster lovers here and elsewhere for most of the year -- all in a misguided effort to prevent a serious but rare health threat.

The FDA announced guidelines, to go into effect in 2011, that would require all Gulf oysters harvested from April through October to undergo a sterilization process before they can be sold. That could double or even triple the cost of Louisiana oysters for consumers and alter their taste, texture and color, something that could hurt this state's famous cuisine.

The agency is taking the step because of vibrio vulnificus, a bacteria that thrives in warm water and can sicken people with immune system disorders who eat raw oysters. People who suffer from AIDS, cancer, kidney disease and diabetes and those who abuse alcohol are at risk. About 30 people per year become ill from vibrio vulnificus, and half those cases are fatal.

But requiring every single Gulf oyster to be sterilized for seven months of the year -- even those destined for the pot or pan and not the half shell -- isn't reasonable. Labeling and other steps to educate those at risk so that they can avoid raw oysters makes far more sense, and the FDA agreed to that very approach in the late 1990s.

Now, suddenly and without warning, the FDA is ushering in a sweeping change without conducting a study or seeking public comment. The agency doesn't seem to have even considered the devastating impact on Louisiana's oyster industry, which employs 3,500 people and produces a third of all oysters consumed in this country. Currently, post-harvest processing can only handle about 10 percent of total production during the seven targeted months. Small mom-and-pop operations will have a difficult time coming up with the money to buy sterilization equipment by 2011.

Louisiana can set its own rules for oysters consumed within the state and doing so will at least ensure that Louisianians can continue to enjoy unprocessed raw oysters. But that won't help the industry significantly since most of Louisiana's oysters are sold out of state. State officials should push the FDA to reconsider this drastic and unfair step.