Righteous Foods, 19 N Oxford Street, New York, NY (2026)

03/29/2024

Classic shellfish purveyor Instagram post: the human brain and the North Atlantic Cod. They do have something in common aside from spending their existence in a dark, briny place so bear with me. One of the reasons I was interested in the industry is a concept from economics called The Tragedy of the Commons which states that when there is a shared resource and no disincentive to use that resource it will be exhausted/destroyed. The Commons refers to common grazing areas in villages. The example they use to show how it works in modern times are fisheries. Nobody "owns" wild fish. They reproduce on their own, and in non territorial waters anyone can take as much as they can catch. As equipment improved we have seen many fisheries collapse but the most famous one is the North American Cod fishery. This happened within your lifetime if you were born before 1990 or so. The human attention span is also viewed as a common resource by social media companies. Their algorithms are designed to hold your attention because attention means money. So it's essentially their goal to hold as much as your attention as they can, and since your attention is your consciousness and your consciousness is who you are, your life is undergoing the same process the cod went through if you're spending a lot of time doing what you're doing now. The cod really had nowhere to hide, but we can just stop having our lives used as a shared resource and use it to do something else. Really anything else. On their death bed nobody ever said "I wish I'd watched more videos on my phone of people dancing and cats being frightened by cucumbers". We know having a social media account and a smart phone is bad for kids, and much like smoking I also suspect it's not great for adults and it's showing up in all areas of life, from the general idiocy of politics to the way people drive to our general level of happiness. I'll get back to talking about oysters within the next few weeks but this is something I've been thinking about a lot over the past few years, particularly as I think about the world my kids are going to live in. Now I'm going to recycle my soap box and go back to doing laundry.

02/28/2024

It's not really the time to talk about individual oysters. In February and March they've been kind of starving for months and they aren't at their best so posting a picture and a review now would be like taking a picture of a person and evaluating their personality just when they get up the morning after drinking half a bottle of whiskey. So instead I'm going to talk a little about New York, where I work and used to live which also happens to be a place that I really love. Post pandemic there have been what I would call a strange amount of stories about what a mess New York City has become, so much so that I thought I was missing something driving through and walking around in it. One morning last year I had to leave a work van in Brooklyn and take the bus home so instead of taking the subway I walked from the office over the Manhattan Bridge (obstructed views of the city but the Brooklyn Bridge is a crowded s**t show to walk over) and up to the Port Authority on West 40th Street. Happy to report that it's fine. When I was growing up in NJ in the 80s we would come in to see a show in midtown and that was a mess. My dad drove trucks in the 70s and used to have to wait under the old west side elevated highway down in Tribeca. His stories about the stuff going on down there at the time were scary. There was a time when New York was dirty and dangerous. There are still places where it is, but whatever you're reading about New York is just a continuation of the proud literary tradition of people having to make a place they don't live in look bad so that the place they do live in looks slightly better. There are crazy people on the streets. There always have been. There are a lot of immigrants, 39 percent of people living in NYC were born in other countries. If they kicked every foreign born person out of the city I would be down 30 percent of my workforce and 70 percent of the people in the kitchens I work with would be gone (by the way I've been in the kitchen in one of Trump's buildings before he was president, same rule applies there). Anyway, I guess my point is save your schadenfreude for a place with more Schaden. Also Bort is apparently based.

02/08/2024

Quonnie Rocks, from Quonochontaug Pond in Rhode Island. They call it a pond but you might know it better as a small bay if you're the type of person who is incapable of keeping more than a few coastal geographic features straight. Thank God they abbreviated the name of this one to Quonnie or I'd routinely sprain my tongue on a regular basis trying to pronounce Quonochontaug. Right now this oyster is very briny up front with a touch of buttery sweetness on the finish. A month ago they were far less salty and more sweet/buttery. Why? Because oysters in general are starting to thin out this time of year. Unlike we humans from colder climates who tend to thicken up in the winter because of our ability to prepare and store food (traditionally (pre refrigeration and interstate rail/highway system)we'd be hitting the cheese, bread and potatoes hard this time of year along with fermented grains and fruits). If you wanted to follow "The Oyster Diet" you'd just be gorging on phytoplankton from late April until early December or so at which point you would be ponderously fat, at this point you would stop eating basically anything at all until late March or early April. The good news is if you survived you'd be extremely thin for your spring break trip to Panama Beach. The bad news is that your pathetic mammalian body would probably stop being alive around now. Oysters are fine though, just working through their glycogen reserves, waiting for the water to warm up so they can get all pudgy in time for summer. This oyster is and has been great this season, it's just saltier right now and less toothsome than it was at its Rubenesque peak 8 weeks ago.

12/18/2023

Penn Cove Selects. Samish Bay, Washington State. We're switching coasts and switching species this week. Crassostrea Gig as (Crassostrea is from the Latin words Crass "Thick" and Ostrea "Oyster" and Gigas "Giant"). So "giant thick oysters" luckily we class it up using dead languages or you'd assume an 8 year old named them. This is the species native to Asia that is also the primary commercial oyster species on the West Coast of the Americas and in Europe.
We over harvested and otherwise severely damaged the population of our native west coast oyster, the Olympia (you can still get them though, there are farmers growing them out there) and these were brought in to replace them. They grow well and quickly almost anywhere and have a thinner, harder shell than the east coast species Crassostrea Virginica. They can also reach enormous size as the name indicates.
I find that Gigas has a lot more native flavor than the Virginica. This one was almost fruity up front with a toothsome texture and some salt, which is probably at similar levels to an eastern oyster grown in Long Island or Massachusetts but is less noticable because of the flavor of the oyster. They are also a little creamier and a little more cloying than east coast stuff. For that reason if I am doing a tasting l always leave the west for last. The shells are beautiful and very mildly duck footed, the purple color that occurs in mollusc shells is generally attributed to "environmental factors' so what they're eating or the substrate they live in being incorporated into their shells. Penn Cove Shellfish in Spanish Bay which is just outside of the Puget Sound (we'll get in there eventually). It's a beautiful, consistent, interesting oyster and comes in a smaller size they call the Samish Pearl.

12/01/2023

The Wellfleet Oyster. The oyster I had today is from Billingsgates shellfish farms from the harvest area CCB 14 (Loagy Bay). Most of the Wellfleets I buy are from CCB 14 (scroll through to see the maps, also available at mass.gov if you want to bear down in your harvest areas). Unlike the Bluepoint, probably the most famous oyster name in the US that generally means nothing in terms of where the actual oyster comes from, Wellfleets are very much from the area around Wellfleets, Ma. Loagy Bay is a smallish bay off of Wellfleet harbor, there are also Wellfleets from that harvest area as well as several others. So generally if you get a Wellfleet anywhere you can be confident that they actually were farmed in that area unless the person or place selling them to you are lazy and change the name so they don't have to explain where they actually come from. The water here is great for growing oysters and they basically haven't stopped harvesting in many centuries. They're a true American classic like the Mustang, corn on the cob, or not voting in midterm elections. Today they were really great. A bit of salt up front with a sweet finish that lingered in my mouth for a bit along with that kind of creaminess you get from an oyster that's fat and happy. Put in a trucker hat, jump in your absurdly oversized SUV, and drive on down to your local raw bar to have one (and demand to see the tag to be sure they're from CCB 14, 10, 13, or 12, chefs love that)

11/15/2023

This is the Barnstable Oyster currently coming out of West Bay in the South Cape in Massachusetts. During the summer and early fall they harvest from Barnstables Harbor which is connected to Cape Cod Bay. Another one of our early oysters, I talked to a chef at a now defunct restaurant in the city and he told me he loved Barnstables so I reached out to the owner, Les Hemmila and after about 18 months to adjust on his end we started shipping his oysters into the city. Les is an interesting guy, he designed and built Abalone boats out in California in his younger days (the abalone fishery in California collapsed due to resource mismanagement, Les just built great boats) and then spent years teaching boat building in Indonesia before coming to Massachusetts and growing oysters. His wife was a detective in Barnstable as well, so they formed the classic detective and oyster farmer couple that you see on all the CSI shows (there should be a CSI Barnstable, it would be incredible). Les has stepped away into a quiet retirement which surely involves solving shellfish related crimes with his wife on a hand built boat and his son Jared now runs the show. I am late on this post because one of the little human plague rats that my wife and I brought into the world got me sick. I am in fact still a little sick and couldn't taste the oyster as well as I normally would be able to, but they're salty and kind of earthy (maybe vegetal is more accurate) with a bit of sweetness at the moment. An excellent, plump oyster. These are the select size but even the petites tend to be plump and a bit bigger than standard petites. I included shot of the back of our tags to remind you that eating raw shellfish or anything else that hasn't been extremely well cooked is a bad idea "if you have certain medical conditions", which doesn't mean a cold but does include people with compromised or suppressed immune systems. My grandmother once asked if I could bring some oysters for a friend of hers who was in the hospital for cancer treatments, that solicited a forceful "no" from me. If you have a bad cold like I do it's fine but I can also say it's a bit of a waste of a good oyster.

11/02/2023

St Simon from New Brunswick, Canada. This is the first Canadian grower we started working with and remains our most geographically far flung oyster (on the east coast) at a whopping 811 miles away from Brooklyn, most of it straight to the Northeast.
The St Simon is a petite Virginica oyster (most oysters in the east coast are Crasostrea Virginica with the exception of some Ostrea Edulis, or European Flat oysters that grow wild in the northeast) that takes 3 to 4 years to reach market size. Why? Because 811 miles north of New York is damn far north and it means they have a abbreviated growing season compared to points south. The bay they're grown in, St Simons Bay is one bay east of the Gulf of St Lawrence. They cut through ice to harvest their oysters from December until about April every year. The mark of this oyster is its consistency and quality. They ship in wax 100 count boxes, all of the oysters nearly packed cup side down, they're remarkably consistent in size, shape, and quality. This kind of consistency generally dictates that the grower of the oyster is a lot like a duck, seemingly placid in the surface while putting out a tremendous amount of effort underwater. The people that grow them, the Mallet family, have a very advanced farming, culling, and packing operation that I have not witnessed in person because I work 7 days a week and they are 811 miles north of me. I can say from a purveyors standpoint I love working with them. They have a commitment to affordability and quality that is precisely what I am looking for. The first oyster I paid for myself cost 25 cents. I don't want the product I sell to be a "luxury good", I want it to be something within reach for a normal person and not just for some Diamond Jim Brady type (Google him).
The shell of the St Simon is brown like this because the water is full of tanins from the nearby peat bogs (I read that somewhere once, it may not be factual). The oyster at the moment is quite briny up front with a hint of sweetness that fades into a slightly metallic/vegetal flavor. They're a great oyster to eat 12 at at sitting. Go do that.

10/19/2023

The hard shell clam, Latin name Mercenaria Mercenaria. Mercenaria comes from the Latin word Mercinarius which means "hired for pay". This is a historical reference to Wampum, which was a shell bead used by Native Americans as a means of exchange and numerous other purposes from the informational to the ornamental to the religious. It was generally paired with white beads made from whelk shells (hard shell clam beads were purple). This is the primary clam species in the northeastern US, if you eat raw clams jn, say, Long Island, the ancestral and present day homeland of people who love to eat raw clams. These grow from the size of farmed clam that I am holding (this is a farmed middleneck, which is roughly the size of a wild littleneck) to chowder clams or quahogs which are over 4 inches in diameter. If you grew up eating clams on the East Coast this is the clam you grew up eating. The manilla clam is more common on the West Coast, Asia, and Europe. But we eat this one, because it's money. Formerly literally but currently in the Vince Vaughn's character in Swingers most commonly used complement sense of the word.

10/13/2023

The Glidden Point Oyster from the Damariscotta River in Maine. Today we're traveling about 650 miles north from the Olde Salt farm in Virginia to the Damariscotta River in Maine to talk about the first oyster we sold from New England (first from outside the state of Virginia). If you really love I95 you could drive between the Rappahannock farm and the Glidden point farm in 12 and change hours. NY is about midway between these farms, which is one of the reasons NYC is a great place to eat oysters, it's within 6 hours of most of the best places to grow them on the East Coast. I first bought these from Barb Scully, the founder of Glidden Point. She bottom culture her oysters and dove for them in scuba gear until the river froze over every year. I cannot emphasize how insane I still find that to be. That is a very dark, very cold job come December. She sold the farm to Ryan McPherson in around 2016. He has added some top culture to the operation making them available year round. I used to think of these as the briniest oyster in our lineup, but they were lower in salt than the Olde Salt which I covered last week. Still on the briny side, they take longer to grow by several years than the stuff down south and have a little more texture/body, I find the abductor to be a little bit more pronounced (the abductor is the muscle that holds an oyster closed.) They finished quite sweet and very clean today and will stay plump until mid January or so when they start to get thinner and more briney. This is an excellent oyster from one of the great places to grow oysters in the world, Maine, whose state motto should be "The Seafood and People who aren't Interested in Hearing your Bulls**t State". I included a shot of the nacre on this oyster (nacre is the pearly white calcium carbonate on the inside of the oyster shell) to show that there are very few burrowing worms and such in Maine compared to most points south where the abundance of them often causes blisters that show up as yellow to black patches on the inside of the shells. That's some clean nacre right there.

10/06/2023

The Olde Salt oyster from Watt's Bay, Virginia. This is the second oyster sold in NY and the theme I am going to go with for this post is how much oyster farming and the quality of farmed oysters in general have improved in the past 15 years. These oysters are grown in a bay tucked right behind Chincoteague Island in Virginia on what they call the DelMarVa (DELaware, MARyland, VirginiA) which is also known as The Eastern Shore in the Chesapeake region.
The Chincoteague Salt is a historically quite well known wild oyster, the Olde Salt name is a branded takeoff of that traditional name as Chincoteague Salts can come from any number of growers or, perhaps, nor be from the area at all for the purposes of selling oysters with less well known appellations. When we first started selling these they were all over the place in terms of quality. They could be grown in cages or Taylor floats, some of them appeared to be bottom culture, they were unpredictable as hell and it honestly drove me nuts. Now they're grown in floating baskets and they're one of my favorite oysters to work with. Consistently shaped and easy to open, I've gone through hundreds of these at events without breaking a single oyster or finding one that was dry. A few years into selling these, around 2010, we shucked a few hundred at an event at the Johnson house and was so frustrated that I called one of the owners to talk about the oyster during the event. The flavor was always great, but it was too damn hard to get into them.
Well they're damn near perfect now, and it took a lot of work to get there, so massive props to Rappahannock River Oysters for doing the work. This oyster is extremely briny and are currently finishing with a hint of sweetness and minerality. In the late winter and early spring they're pure salt.

09/29/2023

I'll begin at the beginning. 15 years ago the first oyster we sold and delivered was the Rappahannock River Oyster from Virginia. You're not going to believe this but it's grown in the Rappahannock River in Virginia (if you'd like a pronunciation of Rappahannock you can just sound it out and pronounce it that way, it doesn't sound like or rhyme with anything). This is a select size oyster (3 to 3 3/4 inches or so right now) deep cupped and heavy at the moment. This is what they call a "sweet" in the Soith. Very light on salt, about 12-14 ppt, (ocean salt levels are between 30 and 40, so now you know that information and can impress your friends). It's delicious, honestly. An oyster we don't sell a lot of at the moment because most people in New York are biased towards northeastern oysters, very few of which are that light on salt because we don't have one of the largest estuaries in the world to grow oysters in, the lovely and talented Chesapeake Bay which I will do a separate post about. Right now this oyster is very very subtly salty and quite buttery and sweet. I personally like briny oysters but it honestly can interfere with what an actual oyster takes like. Would you drink salt water with susshi? No you wouldn't you liar, you'd have a beer or sake or some other such non salty beverage. It's a damn delicious and underappreciated (in New York) oyster for people who like to see what an eastern oyster tastes like.

09/27/2023

This is the hand that is going to be featured in the bulk of our posts. It's the perfectly functional left hand of a married seafood purveyor. It is also what you might call "freakishly large". The palm is about 4 inches by 4 inches so a select size oyster just about fills the palm, while a petite size oyster fits comfortably within it. Anything that takes up the whole hand you should probably think twice about serving on a raw bar unless your customers like 'em big. And save your pity, e-commerce has made it much easier to find gloves that fit.

Righteous Foods

03/29/2024

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