Rappahannock River Oysters: Bringing Back the Bivalves

Bold move to think you can start a small food business, call up New York’s top-rated Le Bernardin, and land your product in the restaurant, straight away, right? But that’s exactly what cousins Ryan and Travis Croxton did in 2005, when they began marketing their Virginia-harvested Rappahannock River Oysters.  Armed with boxes of luscious mollusks and a great story—reinvigorating their great-grandfather’s Chesapeake Bay oystering business through sustainable aquaculture—they “Forrest Gumped” their ways to success, as Travis says, and it worked. 

“We had absolutely no idea what we were going to sell them for, how we were going to get them there,” says Ryan, and were “sweating bullets over trying to shuck.”  Chef de Cuisine Chris Muller helped pop open the shells, took a slurp, and the rest was history.

Today, chefs like Tom Colicchio, Daniel Boulud and Alan Wong stock their restaurants with oyster types that were virtually unheard of and virtually unavailable just 10 years ago. That’s the work of the Croxtons: rebranding Virginia-harvested oysters—often labeled generically on menus as “Chesapeake Bay oysters”—by introducing high-quality, recognizable varieties.  If Massachusetts could have their Wellfleets and Duxburys, so too could Virginia.

The Chesapeake Bay and it’s surrounding rivers used to be so thick with oyster reefs, it was a hazard for shipping vessels.  Due to overfishing, pollution and disease, the Chesapeake’s oyster population declined severely, dropping from more than 20 million bushels a year in 1900 to 1% of that 100 years later.  Things have gotten so dire that there’s been an elaborate proposal to introduce the disease-resistant Asian oyster, C. ariakensis, to repopulate the beds.

So, in 2002, when the lease for the Croxton family’s vast oyster beds were up for renewal, keeping the business going wasn’t an obvious choice. Ryan and Travis’s great-grandfather had strongly discouraged the family from staying in this tenuous trade, and the oyster beds had sat inactive for 10 years.  The cousins, who were working in finance and marketing, decided to take the plunge into oystering anyway. Their grandfather sold dredged oysters to Campbell’s soup; they would raise high-quality oysters sustainably in cages to sell to raw bars.

According to the book The Geography of Oysters, many of the area’s native wild oysters—Crassotrea virginica—with their mild, bland taste, never were of the highest raw bar standards.  Many were used as shucked meat, while others were removed and plunked into more northern waters to soak up more salt flavor, then marketed under local names such as Bluepoint. 

There were some exceptions, such as the famous since colonial times oysters that come from the more saline river mouths of the Virginia end of the Bay. Luckily, the Croxton family beds are located in this prime real estate.

To Ryan and Travis, real estate is everything. They insist that their four oyster varieties express “meroir,” with each type exhibiting a different taste profile related to where in the estuary they were harvested. 

The virginica’s clean flavor enables it to take on the conditions of wherever it’s growing, and is effected by things like salinity, water temperature, and tidal. Ryan says water conditions vary at every bend of the Rappahannock River, one of their key harvesting sites: “anywhere you plop down, you’re going to get a completely different taste profile.”

Thanks to its upriver home, the Rappahannock is one of the least salty oysters on the East Coast. Buttery, sweet, and smooth, it’s like a gateway oyster for those who are not sold on the wonders of a mouthful of salty, saline mollusk. Those who like their oysters more briny might prefer the ocean-side Olde Salt, which the Croxtons say taste like “like swapping spit with a mermaid.”  Stingrays are their happy medium, with a blend of sweetness and mild brine.

There’s also the Barcat,  a variety of oyster grown by formerly wild oysterman using aquaculture. The oysters are finished off in Croxton beds, and sold by cooperative with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. The imitative is a way to teach independent oystermen modern techniques and keep them employed.

The Croxtons’ aquaculture method is an alternative for the harmful dredging methods of yester-year.  They buy champion seedlings from oyster hatcheries, which are genetically superior and more disease-resistant than wild oysters, and grow them in small cages in the water, which protects them from predators. 

As breed after seafood breed gets crossed off the list as endangered, overfished, or habitat-hurting, farmed oysters are given Monterrey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch’s “best choice” rating for sustainability.  An added value is that oysters clean water, with each mollusk filtering up to 50 gallons a day, so the Croxtons are helping to reduce oxygen-sucking algae blooms and purify the polluted Chesapeake Bay.

The Chesapeake Bay’s oyster aquaculture industry is ten times as large it was just five years ago.  Ryan and Travis Croxton—who now sell more than one million oysters a year—along with their fellow aquaculturalists, are helping put oysters back into Chesapeake Bay, and onto the culinary map.

In this food video, learn more about the Rappahannock sustainable aquaculture practice, and watch chefs R.J. Cooper (Rogue 24),  and David Guas (Bayou Bakery) prepare an oyster-filled feast.

  As part of this road trip to Virginia, we also visited Chapel Hill Farm, which is preserving an endangered beef cattle breed—the Randall Lineback—by raising it for it’s delicious rose veal.  Click here to watch this food video.