Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/648009
W I N T E R / S P R I N G 2 0 1 6 | 1 3 GETTING OYSTERS TO RESTAURANTS all over the country can be tricky, especially when dealing with a food product that can only be eaten fresh, but Blue Island Oyster manages to ship 30 different varieties of oysters all over the country twice a week. The business was founded in 1995 by Chris Quartuccio, who dived for the oysters himself in the Long Island Sound, and sold them to restaurants in New York City. Twenty-one years later, Blue Island Oyster Company is the second largest distributor of oysters in the United States, and sources from oyster farms globally, from Baja Mexico to New Zealand, which allows them to sell oysters year round. "It's a time sensitive process," admits Todd Mark Rubenstein, the West Coast Operations Manager. "Our oysters are delivered one to two days after they're harvested. When we receive orders from our accounts, their oysters haven't even been harvested yet." Once harvested, each oyster is hand-graded, sized and cleaned before being shipped to restaurants and markets. The oysters are a combination of farmed and wild, but all are raised in a natural environment. "All oysters are naturally organic," Rubenstein explains. "Unlike farmed tuna or salmon, oysters aren't fed foods they normally wouldn't consume." Farmed oysters are raised in a similar environment to wild oysters, but are less susceptible to predators, and have access to more of the abundant food sources that derive from algae. Of the 30 different varieties of oysters that Blue Island carries, each is unique to the location where it is grown. These differences can hold true even within the same body of water, depending on where the oysters are farmed. "Oysters have their own terroir," Ru- benstein notes. "A Kumamoto oyster from Baja will take two years to grows to maturity and will be 40% saltier than a Kumamoto from Washington, which will take three years to mature." Todd Mark Rubenstein West Coast Operations Manager, Blue Island Oyster Company Jim Reichardt Founder of Liberty Ducks in Sonoma County, California COMING FROM A FAMILY that has raised ducks since 1901, it's only natural that Jim Reichardt would end up a fourth-generation duck farmer. However, while his family has traditionally raised the Pekin ducks that you often find hanging crispy and red in the windows of restaurants in Chinatown, Reichardt took a different path. As Reichardt recalls, "In the early '90s there was the rise of Cali- fornia cuisine from chefs like Alice Waters, based on techniques that they were bringing back from Europe. With these European tech- niques came a demand for European ducks, and I wanted to capture that emerging market." While they are the same Pekin duck as those used in Chinese cooking, the ducks are raised for nine weeks instead of the usual six, allowing them to have meatier breasts and a more developed flavor. Nowadays, with only eight employees helping him, Reichardt receives 2,500 ducklings a week, and has 25,000 birds on his farm at any given time. His ducks are used in dishes in fine dining restau- rants such as Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Daniel in New York City and Spago in Beverly Hills. Reichardt is also active in the Slow Food movement, as well as the Live Stock Conservancy, which, similar to the preservation of heirloom plants, aims to help preserve livestock breeds endangered by mass commercialization. ■cr