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Fresh Oysters Available In Landlocked Fort Wayne

By Tzahy Lerner (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons

It’s the middle of January, and Northeast Indiana is hundreds of miles from the ocean, but you can still get fresh oysters from the Chesapeake Bay. In this week’s segment of NorthEATS Indiana, WBOI’s Lisa Ryan reports on where to find fresh bivalves in Fort Wayne, and how far they have to travel to get to your plate.

Not everyone likes oysters.

“They kind of scare me. They’re kind of like boogers,” said Brittany Shroyer, an employee at Paula’s on Main. While she doesn’t like the taste of oysters, she doesn’t deny that they’re fresh. She says they’re delivered two to three times a week from the Chesapeake Bay, which is about 700 miles from Fort Wayne.

Customers can buy the oysters raw from the seafood market. Shroyer or another employee can also open the oysters for customers for an additional 50 cents per oyster.

“Sometimes you get war wounds like some of have from them, and some of them are easy to open, it just depends on how hard they want to fight to keep closed I guess you could say,” Shroyer said.

Oyster aficionados say they can tell that difference between warm and cold water oysters, and those grown on the east and west coasts of the country. The Oyster Bar on Calhoun Street also receives shipments of oysters from the Chesapeake Bay. The restaurant’s owner, Steve Gard, says he prefers oysters from that part of the country.

“For me, cold water has, it’s got a little more firmer texture, and it’s a little sweeter,” Gard said.

Gard says all the oysters he serves are four inches. They’re delivered in 160-count bushels, and they go through about 6-8 bushels per week.

“The preparation is extremely important,” he said. “We try not to gum it up stuff with too much sauce.”

The Oyster Bar hasn’t always served oysters from the Chesapeake Bay. In fact, the restaurant wasn’t always an oyster bar. According to its website, it was started in 1888 but started serving oysters in 1954.

It’s pretty easy to find oysters in the Midwest this time of year, but it could be harder for them to get to your plate in the future. In recent years there has been a significant decline in the oyster population due to overharvesting, disease, and habitat loss. This decline hurts the Chesapeake Bay’s ecosystem because oysters clean the water by filtering it through their gills.

However there are efforts in place to help boost the population. The Chesapeake Bay Program is a regional partnership working to restore the Bay’s natural ecology. According to its website, oysters in the Chesapeake could filter the Bay’s entire water supply in two to three days in the 19th century. Today, it would take nearly a year.

The Chesapeake Bay Program it trying to combat issues like air pollution, wastewater, and the declining oyster population. By addressing these issues, the Bay can help save the oysters, and the oysters can help save the Bay. And that means you can still eat oysters in Fort Wayne in the middle of winter.

Back at the Oyster Bar is employee Jack Reading. He’s been working there since 1968 and has been shucking oysters ever since.

He demonstrates how to cut open the shell of the bivalve. The trick, Reading says, is to not cut into the oyster.

““That’s how you open oysters,” he said. “Some people go inside, mess up the belly.”

Reading serves the oysters to the next customer. The customer probably doesn’t know how far it traveled to get to their plate, the important role it plays in the delicate ecosystem of the Chesapeake Bay, or they organizations trying to preserve the species.

But, they know they’re delicious, and they know where to find them in Northeast Indiana.

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