Oysters!

[lsanderson]

Oyster Farmers Find a Boutique in the Bay
By KIM SEVERSON

Southampton, N.Y.

PULLING out a receipt from the Grand Central Oyster Bar when you’re standing on the quiet shores of the Shinnecock Indian reservation seems so wrong.

Ancestors of the 600 people who live here have been gathering shellfish along the eastern shores of Long Island for centuries, with no help from professional shuckers and certainly no credit cards.

Madeleine Rogers, the tribal council member who manages the modest oyster farm the Shinnecocks started three years ago, studied the price that a briny Long Island oyster might bring 90 miles away, in Manhattan: $2.05. Then she looked out at the bay, where mesh bags and plastic trays hold almost 250,000 of them. Plenty were full of meat, ready for the underappreciated spring oyster season, which starts in May and ends in June.

“I ought to just fill up the back of the car and drive a bunch of these over there,” she said.

They would no doubt be downed quickly. New York’s appetite for oysters is long and legendary, rising and falling for decades along with the wild stocks that grow in nearby waters. More