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“I felt like there was nobody in the world who was the oyster aficionado, so I set out to become that person,” says Chef Kevin Joseph. “I coined the phrase mermellier, which means: to be the sommelier of seafood.”
Photo by Mic Smith
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Partners in conservation
Tom Bierce, owner of Charleston Oyster Farm (left), is more than a supplier of farm-raised single oysters. He and Kevin Joseph are on a mission to protect South Carolina’s natural oyster rakes. “If we want to keep the tradition of oyster roasting alive,” Bierce says, “we have to take the pressure off our wild oysters.”
Photo by Mic Smith
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Local flavor
Farm-raised single oysters like the ones harvested at Charleston Oyster Farm, are managed throughout their lives to be Instagram ready, says Tom Bierce. “We are cultivating and pruning these oysters to a perfect shape, but mother nature gets all the credit for the flavor.”
Photo by Mic Smith
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It’s all about presentation
At Raw Lab, chef Kevin Joseph serves his Gingered Salmon Belly Tower to the tune of “2001: A Space Odyssey” to heighten the experience. “Just a little theatrics,” he says with a grin.
Photo by Mic Smith
Sharp-shelled bivalve. Pearl-bearing mollusk. Delicious slimeball. The Eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica, is a little creature for whom it’s easy to wax rhapsodic. Gastronomically, they’re the raison d'être of raw bars and the soul of seafood joints. Ecologically, they’re the keystone species of the South Carolina salt marsh—filter feeders who keep the water clean, the kidneys of the coast.
“Not just ecologically important but also metaphysically important,” explains Kevin Joseph one evening at his Charleston restaurant, Raw Lab. “The reason we eat slimy, cold things that look like giant boogers is that Homo sapiens as a species got pushed further and further south to the Indian Ocean, where they discovered, for the first time, the tide going out. Once they started eating oysters, their bodies grew, their heads grew, their brains grew, they got more body fat, and they expanded back north.”
As he’s sermonizing on the oyster, he’s also shucking one, prying it open at the hinge with his flat-bladed oyster knife and laying it down on a bed of ice. Then he’s grating fresh wasabi root over the oyster and denouncing the “wasabi” of most sushi places as “dehydrated and pulverized horseradish, rehydrated with green food coloring.”
This real wasabi right here, he promises, will change your life. And knowing how to chew an oyster—to move it around in your mouth and taste the complex layers of flavor, and not just swallow it whole—will change your life, too. And this homemade American mignonette sauce (apple cider vinegar, shallots, green apple peel and green pepper) drizzled atop an oyster? Life-changing.
You get the sense that when Kevin Joseph was told the world was his oyster, he took it to mean the oyster was also his world. And he wants nothing more than to convert us all into oysterheads.
“We’re still in the beginning stage of how to eat oysters, where to find oysters, how to appreciate oysters, what sauces to use, what not to do,” Joseph says. “I think we’re in the beginning of an oyster revolution.”
Four evenings a week at Raw Lab, Joseph orchestrates a three-hour, 11-course dining experience that’s part TED Talk, part science experiment, part party. On the night I visited, in early September, electronic Caribbean dance music played in the intimately dim barroom for diners making their way through an omakase menu (a Japanese term for dishes selected by the chef) “from the bottom of the seafood chain.” It’s what Joseph has dubbed “Marine Cuisine”—dishes like Crab Gazpacho, Shrimp Ceviche, Lobster Salad, Cubed Salmon, and, of course, oysters. Most of it is local; all of it is raw.
“I felt like there was nobody in the world who was the oyster aficionado, so I set out to become that person. I coined the phrase mermellier, which means: to be the sommelier of seafood,” he says.
He does not, however, remember his first oyster. He says it must have been when he was growing up in Long Island, New York, in a family of restaurateurs. And unlike the oyster itself, which stays put in one spot, Joseph has bounced all over. Stints in event marketing in Denver, as a private chef in Florida and New York, as a world traveler—all of it seems to have cultivated his unique blend of entrepreneur, foodie, professor and showman.
When he arrived in Charleston, he began cold-calling every oyster farm on the South Carolina coast to buy their oysters for his pop-up Shuck Truck. That’s how he got hooked up with Tom Bierce, the owner of Charleston Oyster Farm and someone whose love and knowledge of oysters equals Joseph’s.
“I could talk oysters literally all day,” Bierce says one fine Thursday in mid-September, two weeks after my visit to Raw Lab, when I meet Bierce and Joseph and their crew to take stock of the farm and the work they’re doing to ensure oysters keep arriving on our plates.
When we arrive by boat at the farm in Green Creek, off the Stono River, all I see are long lines of floating buoys and cages. Bierce, who was a commercial diver before he became an oyster farmer, stops the boat and slips on his gloves and boots. He reaches with a gaff to grab hold of one of the cages, and with the help of his crew and a winch, he brings the cage into the boat.
Inside the cage are some of the finest oysters I’ve ever seen. Throughout the year, Bierce continually flips the cages and knocks off the “spat”—the tiny oyster larvae attached to the shells. This is what normally causes wild oysters to grow in clusters, but here, Bierce concentrates on harvesting “market-ready” single selects.
“We’ve gotten really lucky,” Bierce says. “We are cultivating and pruning these oysters to a perfect shape, but mother nature gets all the credit for the flavor.”
Demand for farm-raised singles is so high that the Charleston Oyster Farm will scale up from taking 80,000 oysters to market in 2022, to over 400,000 oysters in 2023. And it’s also why both men feel a responsibility to protect and sustain the fishery.
“If we want to keep the tradition of oyster roasting alive in the Lowcountry,” Bierce says, “we have to take the pressure off our wild oysters.”
On the boat, Bierce hands Joseph an oyster from the cage and a shucking knife. Like he does countless times each week at Raw Lab, Joseph shucks open the freshly plucked oyster and detaches it from the shell by scraping the adductor muscle. He proffers one to each person onboard, like a perfect gift, and we all do as he instructs us—chew slowly and thoroughly, move it around in our palate, and taste the taste of our local waters.
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Get There
Raw Lab, located at 99 S. Market Street in Charleston, is open Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. The dining experience begins at 6 p.m. Reservations are required through resy.com or by calling (843) 580-7729.
Tours of Charleston Oyster Farm can be booked online at charlestonoysterfarm.com.