Kitchen ·
Where the oysters come from
Forty minutes north, in a bay that freezes the hands of everyone who works it. A morning with the people who grow what we open at seven.
The oysters at dinner travel less far than most of the staff. They are grown in a shallow bay forty minutes north, on racks that go under at high water and sit in the wind at low.
We drove up at five to see a harvest, which is the only honest way to write about it.
Cold, and then colder
Harvest happens at the bottom of the tide, which in November means the dark. Four people work a rack line in chest waders, flipping bags, culling the undersized back into the water, and stacking the rest into crates that come off the flats on a sled.
Nobody talks much. The water is nine degrees and the wind comes straight down the bay.
“People think it is farming. It is closer to unloading a lorry, in the sea, in the dark, for four hours.”
Marta, who has run the lease since 2011
Why they taste the way they do
The bay is fed by a river at one end and the open Pacific at the other, so salinity swings with the season. Autumn oysters, after the summer has concentrated the bay, are the saltiest and the firmest. Spring oysters are softer and sweeter and worse for the mignonette, which is why the recipe changes in March.
That is the whole argument for buying from forty minutes away rather than from a distributor. Not provenance as decoration — just the ability to change what you do in the kitchen because you know what happened in the bay that week.