WHILE WE'RE SAYING ERSTERS, HE SAYS OYSTERS
The old cliché says that the oyster is an aphrodisiac. For a lot of people the only thing eating oysters causes one to fall in love with is oysters.
In Toronto the king of oyster lovers (and shameless promoter of the mollusk in question) has to be Rodney Clark. And with some hard work and a vast knowledge of the beloved bivalve, Rodney is hoping to introduce a better product to other oyster lovers in Toronto and beyond. Toronto is going to start seeing genuine Canadian East Cost boutique oysters.
Rodney, of Rodney’s Oyster House on King West, is opening up an oyster depot at a wharf in Nine Mile Creek, Prince Edward Island. The foundation for the 345 sq. metre plant was laid over the weekend. Rodney’s Oyster Depot, will buy, grow, grade, package and ship oysters to customers throughout North America and the world. The plant will also have an oyster tasting room, retail outlet, and interpretive centre. The building will be environmentally friendly, using geo-thermal, solar, and other green energy technologies
But the point is to create a sustainable industry and produce a better oyster.
“We want to try to change the oyster industry from a fishery to farming which is the future of the oyster,” Rodney said on the line from PEI where he was recovering from an early morning auction and the after effects of the annual Bootleggers Ball the night before.
He said the east coast Crassostrea virginica is a slow growing oyster, much slower than the west coast Crassostrea gigas.
“The gigas takes about two years to bring to market. The virginica, especially in the waters around Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island can take up to seven years.”
It’s a question of changing the method of bringing the shellfish to market, from fishing to farming.
New York oyster eaters have recently been favoured with dozens of boutique growers. Since 2000, the number of state-issued aquaculture permits there has grown to 51 from 38, and the number of oysters harvested has doubled.
Rodney and his crew - having already established exclusive south shore leases and even trying to involve some seed fishermen - want to see that kind of interest repeated north of the border.
And key to that success is getting pre-1980-quality Malpeques on Toronto dinners’ plates. “What made a great oyster and what made a great Malpeque was shape consistency, size consistency, and meat quality consistency. If I can lock that in to what they were prior to 1979 then I’m going to be very successful in going to buyers in Chicago or Philadelphia or Houston, Texas, and be able to tell them how many and when they’ll be ready.”
“I’m coming from the point-of-view of serving oysters to people and paying attention to oyster gurus and reading. I see the person put their fork in it and that person is the person who pays the bill, who determines the market.”
Along with his Island partners Dean MacEachern and Dale Small and plenty of seed money from Bay street wizard Eric Sprott ceo of Sprott Asset Management the depot should be operational this summer.
It was Sprott who encouraged Rodney to try his hand at growing them. “He would come into Rodney’s and I said offhand one day about four years ago that I should try growing them. He said why not. I thought nothing of it but every time he came in he’d ask about our ‘oyster project’.”
In the beginning of course the product will be wholesaled through his existing business at Rodney’s oyster house, which is where it all started.
“When I came up here in 1986/87 we had six people, now we have 66 families in Southern Ontario we support. When you go out to Rodney’s you’re giving 66 people their livelihood and you’re making an investment in the future of shellfish, the future of seafood.”
This article originally appeared at tasteto.com.
Gadzooks! and the Gadzookians are big oyster fans. Join us for some bivalve fun this July!