Omnivore - Lucky at Lusca’s Oyster Happy Hour

Ahhh, the oyster happy hour. It’s a bandwagon I’m happy to hop on, and more and more restaurants around town are making it easier to do so than ever before. If you like digging in to loads of pristine oysters packed elegantly over ice, Kimball House offers the best and broadest selection in town - and its “happy hour” is rightfully packed weekdays from five to seven as bivalve lovers partake of half-priced beauties. But if you live and work on the other side of town, getting to Kimball House during rush hour can be a maddening bumper-to-bumper purgatory. My favorite more-centrally-located path to paradise is Lusca, where you’ll find the same half price deal from five to seven on weekdays (though with an admittedly much smaller selection of oysters on offer).

Last Friday after work, oysters and cocktails were calling my name, so my wife and I headed for the bar at Lusca, where GM and beverage director Stuart White whipped up some cocktails and alerted us to the oyster menu. There were some beautiful Beausoleils from New Brunswick, some small and sweet Chunus from Virginia, some plump and crisp Wellfleets from Massachusetts, and.... among the very last of the Drakes Bay oysters from California. Seeing that name on the list was a bit of a shock - because the Drakes Bay oyster is now essentially a thing of the past.

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• Drakes Bay Oyster Farm

Yes, our timing at Lusca was lucky. The last Drakes Bay oysters were pulled from the waters of Drakes Estero, in the shadows of Point Reyes, California, just after the new year. This was the concluding chapter of a long war between the Drakes Bay Oyster Company and the National Park Service, a rare battle that saw the government joining with hardcore environmentalists to battle it out with devoted oyster lovers and foodies. You’ve probably deduced ... the government won. Drakes Bay closed their retail shop back on July 31, but continued to harvest and sell wholesale as their stocks of oysters wound down. This batch that arrived at Lusca as the clocks turned to 2015 was among the very last sold.

Having lived near San Francisco and hiked the hills above Drakes Estero, I felt a tinge of sadness as we slurped down the oysters - knowing that those waters may never produce oysters for human enjoyment again. I swear I got a good whiff of the coastal California hills, dotted with cattle, covered in fog, as I brought a Drakes Bay oyster to my lips. Salt air. Farmland funk. We had Lusca’s chef/owner Angus Brown to thank for that final taste. He’s had a long relationship with Drakes Bay, having visited often over the last decade. Brown recalled to me visiting his brother in Northern California, where, “we pretty much used to go straight from the airport to ​Drake​s. ​And five years ago, we bought 1,000 oysters for my brother​’​s wedding​. Not only were the oysters beyond perfect​, ​the farm was beautiful. Drakes is m​​y favorite ​W​est ​Coast oyster.”

So Brown’s relationship with Drakes Bay helped bring some of the last of those Drakes Bay oysters out of the Golden State, across the country, to Lusca in Atlanta. “I am obsessed w​ith​​ California seafood in general. Dungeness, sea urchin, black cod, sardines, anchovies, squid, butter clams, gaper clams, cockles. ​T​​hat’s what I mostly sell. I b​u​y direct from fishermen ​and h​ave ​the seafood shipped ​by S​outhwest Cargo ​(because it’s refrigerated), then pick it up at the airport. I have a great relationship w​ith​ the guys at ​(seafood purveyor) TwoXSea​​ ​- owner ​Kenny ​B​elov is pretty much writing the book on sustainable and direct fish-mongering. He was able to send me 500 ​Drakes ​B​ay oysters a day after ​their last day of production.”

I may never have another Drakes Bay oyster, but I’ll certainly think of Drakes Bay and those Point Reyes waters every time I sit down to a silver tray, packed with ice, slices of lemon, shells laid out just so. Even amidst the sadness of one beautiful oyster farm shutting down, we can smile, knowing of the bounty of dedicated and sustainable oyster farms producing delicacies from Washington to Maine and down the coasts. We’ve got plenty cause to be happy.