A number of obstacles hold back a booming aquaculture industry, from the cumbersome lease approval process to community protests by neighbors or watermen, to the sizable upfront investment required—not to mention breaking your way into the market and dealing with Mother Nature. Hudson recalls one particular supermoon-fueled nor’easter whose extremely low tides left them with hundreds of thousands of dead oysters. Then, of course, there was the coronavirus, which hammered the hospitality industry—an oyster farm’s bread and butter.

“Overnight, our sales fell 100 percent,” says Hudson, whose Skinny Dipper and Huckleberry varieties are sold at more than 60 regional restaurants—including their own—plus gourmet grocers such as Whole Foods and MOM’s Organic Markets, which helped them weather the pandemic.

Since this spring, when vaccinations allowed restaurants to begin reopening in earnest, demand has rebounded quickly, continuing its upward trend as shown over the past decade. “There are more seafood restaurants and oyster bars and in general a more informed public,” says Hudson. “New demographics are beginning to eat oysters and are also becoming more environmentally aware,” connecting the dots between aquaculture and a healthy ecosystem.

Hauling oysters. Photography by Christopher Myers

Just like their wild counterparts, farm-raised oysters improve their local water quality, while also easing pressure on the estuary’s depleted populations and promoting a sustainable fishery, thanks in part to the advent of the year-round triploid oyster. Hudson hopes a generational shift will continue to push this education, and his industry, forward.

“When young people look out and see these buoys in St. Jerome Creek, they think, something cool is happening here,” he says. “Culturally, we look at the Chesapeake Bay as a luxury—a view. If we started to look at it instead as an economic engine that can coexist with the ecosystem and provide quality food, imagine what things would look like. You’d see more oysters in the market. More Ryans in the industry. And we’d have a healthier Chesapeake Bay.”

When did oyster bars become the coolest places to eat? Over the past few years, these seafood spots have crept their way onto lists of the hippest dining establishments, and for good reason. Like oysters, they’re the just-right mix of no-frills and fancy, encouraging a way of eating that’s steeped in nostalgia, supportive of the farm-to-table movement, and features a central communal dining space around which friends and strangers can come together even in divisive times. It’s a trend we hope is here to stay. Order a dozen—or few—at any of these city favorites.

Ready for service at Dylan’s. Photography by Christopher Myers

DYLAN’S OYSTER CELLAR

Hampden

The perfect oyster bar exists on a quiet corner in Hampden, where a mermaid mural mingles with a half-shell-eating Jesus collage and, in non-COVID times, happy hour includes Natty Boh tallboys and buck-a-shuck specials from their thoughtfully curated selection. Owners Dylan and Irene Salmon live up to their seafoody last name. 3601 Chestnut Ave.

FAIDLEY SEAFOOD

Downtown

It is a rite of passage to sit down to a paper plate of fat half-shells at the central raw bar of this O.G. seafood establishment in Lexington Market. In ole Bawlmer fashion, they serve them on the “flats,” or top shell, with lemon and a pack of Saltines. Order a beer, and be sure to chat up Lou if he’s your shucker. 203 N. Paca St.

THE LOCAL OYSTER

POP-UP

From shucking on the city streets to a legendary brick-and-mortar at Mount Vernon Marketplace (which sadly closed in 2023), the L.O.’s beloved bivalve slinger Nick Schauman has played a vital part in making oysters cool again in Baltimore. You can now catch him at events and catering gigs all over town.

MAMA’S ON THE HALF SHELL

Canton

After more than 20 years, this Canton corner bar has become a Baltimore classic, with weekend afternoons usually overflowing with locals who have flocked for oysters nearly every way you can eat them, alongside freshly squeezed orange crushes and Orioles and Ravens games on the TV. An ideal Saturday afternoon. 2901 O’Donnell St.

THAMES STREET OYSTER HOUSE

Fells Point

For a while, this Fells Point seafood haven was the only game in town serving up fine-dining flights of oysters, but even as new spots have come onto the scene, theirs remain some of the cleanest shucks around. Their impressive oyster list includes top varieties from Canada to the West Coast. 1728 Thames St.

TRUE CHESAPEAKE OYSTER CO.

Hampden

The only oyster farm-owned restaurant in the state, this Whitehall Mill pillar is the outpost of its namesake aquaculture operation. Their Southern Maryland-raised Skinny Dipper and Huckleberry oysters are always hawked at their sleek bar, alongside elevated Chesapeake cuisine by locally loved chef Zack Mills. 3300 Clipper Mill Rd.

THE URBAN OYSTER

Hampden

This Black-owned oyster bar—also a staple at the Baltimore Farmers Market on Sundays—always worth a visit for chef Jasmine Norton’s fan-favorite chargrilled oysters, featuring flavor variations like barbecue-bacon-cheddar and teriyaki. 914 W. 36th St.

FARTHER AFIELD: Ryleigh’s Oyster, Lutherville-Timonium; The Curious Oyster, Nottingham; Sailor Oyster Bar, Annapolis; Old Ebbitt Grill, Washington, D.C.; Pearl Dive, Washington, D.C.; Ruse, St. Michaels.

In action at the raw bar at Thames Street Oyster House, and classic signage at Faidley Seafood. Photography by Christopher Myers and Scott Suchman, respectively

GameChanger:
Imani Black

We catch up with the founder of Minorities in Aquaculture.

Photography by Mike Morgan

Thanks to global demand, aquaculture, aka the farming of seafood, has quickly become the world’s fastest growing food system, and Eastern Shore native Imani Black is working to ensure that more minorities are included in the conversation. An alum of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), and currently a faculty research assistant at the University of Maryland’s Horn Point Laboratory, the 26-year-old oyster farmer has launched a nonprofit aimed at nurturing a more diverse and inclusive industry, while also honoring the historic contributions of African Americans on the Chesapeake Bay.

What was your first connection to the water?
Since childhood, my family and I would always go down to the Chestertown wharf [on the Eastern Shore] and fish on Sundays after church. When I was seven, I went to an overnight environmental science camp at the Horn Point Laboratory [of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Cambridge]. We learned all about striped bass, blue crabs, oysters, submerged aquatic vegetation. I was an active kid who loved being outside and on the water. I just understood it. From there, I got into 4-H and community cleanups and volunteering, and it just stuck with me.   You graduated with a degree in marine biology at the Old Dominion University in Virginia before pursuing a career in aquaculture, working with two strong women-led teams at CBF and VIMS. When did you connect that there were still not enough women, let alone women of color, in this industry? After college, I worked at an oyster farm in Virginia and got smacked in the face being the only woman. I was coming out of playing Division 1 lacrosse, but I’d be carrying totes from one end of the dock to the other and three guys would be like, “Oh no, no, that’s too heavy.” The owner would say, all hands on deck, but not you, this is a man’s job.   It was frustrating. The only other people of color I saw were Hispanic and African-American men who were laborers on the farm. I had just one girl of color in my marine classes in college. But growing up on the Eastern Shore, I was the token Black girl most of the times. My lacrosse team was white. My coaches were white. My teachers were white. I was comfortable in that role. It didn’t affect me until later on.   What made you start to see it differently? Because I’d been the token, I never really wanted to call things racist. If somebody was being a certain way, I’d be like, maybe they’re just having a bad day. But eventually I got to the place [in my career] where I’d done all I could do, been a great employee, showed up my best, worked on myself, and still kept hitting walls. That’s when I really had to be like, okay, maybe…   When did the idea for Minorities in Aquaculture come about? I actually had the semi-idea last January. I had seen this Netflix show, Chef’s Table, with Mashama Bailey, a Black chef in Savannah, Georgia, who converted a once-segregated Greyhound bus station into a five-star gourmet restaurant. In her episode, there are two Black oyster farmers, which was the first time I’d ever seen a Black-owned oyster farm. I asked myself when the last time was that I saw a person of color in a leadership role in aquaculture.   Then May came. Ahmaud Arbery was probably the one that really shifted my view, because when I found out, I had just gotten back from a jog. It became so real. The few in our industry who put out statements [following the death of George Floyd] talked about conferences and forums to make aquaculture more diverse. I thought, what are people who don’t even look like me going to do? A lot of Black scientists had the same thought at the same time, with like 12 organizations being formed last summer. Black By Nature. Black Birders. Black in Marine Science. I knew when I started MIA that it was a lot bigger than me. And if you don’t do it, who’s going to?   What are some of the biggest obstacles for minorities entering marine sciences? Exposure. A lot of people, let alone people of color, don’t know what aquaculture is. They don’t know that more than 50 percent of the seafood that we eat is farm raised. And when you’re not from an area that has a connection to the water, how can we ever expect you to? We can’t ask people to be biologists or conservationists if they don’t understand their environment.   Also, representation. I had an interview at the Hudson Valley Steelhead Trout Farm facility in upstate New York and saw one Black lady who worked there. When I got the job, I took every chance I could get to talk to her. I can only imagine what more experiences like that would mean for the industry.   What has it been like to find resources and even members for MIA? Super hard. People generally think there’s some list of Black women that I have in my back pocket. I’m like, do you know any black women? Please, give them my name! We’re starting from the ground up with a few PhD students. We can support their research and be a soundboard. Right now, we’re looking at battling some of the obstacles they face in this industry.   You’ve also been diving into the history of Black watermen on the Chesapeake, which includes your own family. How have you gone about your research? I first learned about Kermit Travers—this highly respected Black skipjack captain from Blackwater, where I had been driving every single day for work. Then I came across Vincent Leggett and his Blacks of the Chesapeake organization, where I really learned from his writing about where we had been and what we had done.   I’m not doing something new; I’m doing something that was a part of my family and so many other people’s families for centuries. There are 12 active Black captains on the Chesapeake today, all over the age of 60, and we used to have 900. This is a part of our history that’s actively dying, and there have been thousands of stories of Black watermen that have never been written. It’s about getting more people of color involved, but also preserving this history.

Inside Maryland’s MAD-SCIENCE oyster hatchery.

Oyster “spat.” Photography by Christopher Myers

DOWN A LONG, TREE-LINED drive along the Choptank River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore stands one of the nation’s leading experts in all things aquatic science. Across its 800-acre campus in Cambridge, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s Horn Point Laboratory produces renowned research on the organisms of the Chesapeake—perhaps none more than its native oyster, which once thrived along these shorelines.

“It’s said that once upon a time, there were enough oysters to filter the entire bay in three days,” says Mike Roman, Horn Point’s director. “Today, we have less than one percent of what we used to.”

Which is why they’re here. Inside the teal-tinged central building, hallways lead past some of the lab’s 125-person staff—research scientists, professors, and students all with different projects underway, from measuring the impact of low water salinities on oyster mortality, a concern amplified by the wetter springs of climate change, to prototyping manmade reefs to combat the eroding shorelines of sea-level rise. Eventually you reach its pièce de résistance in the northwest corner, in a series of rooms that make up the oyster hatchery.

“It looks like a microbrewery, doesn’t it?,” says Roman, standing amidst tanks and whiteboards and below a ceiling crisscrossed with some six miles of pipe carrying several kinds of water.

This is where the magic happens. One of the largest of its kind on the East Coast, the state-of-the-art facility is essentially an oyster factory, where, every year, they raise billions of oyster larvae, all of which will eventually end up back in the bay, with a goal of restoring its historic reefs and stabilizing its depleted wild oysters.

Algae starters Photography by Christopher Myers

It all begins in one otherwise ordinary lab room. Here, the broodstock—aka parent oysters pulled from the wild during the winter months—are kept in temperature-controlled water that encourages them to reproduce. A controlled environment is key for the scientists, because oysters spawn externally, meaning that both eggs and sperm are released and fertilized in the open water. Just before the big moment, staff separate the oysters by sex, catch their respective reproductive cells, mix them in a plastic bucket, and, however unromantically—voilà— conception. Before long, the fertilized eggs will develop into larvae.

“We have an entire cafeteria kitchen where we’re growing food to feed them,” says hatchery manager Stephanie Alexander, walking into a small side lab equipped with bright lights, computer screens, and dozens of 20-liter carboys full of colorful shades of algae. Like a beer or sourdough starter, it will eventually be inoculated into larger quantities, filling chambers the size of spacious hot tubs in the outdoor greenhouse.

Multiple times a day, algae is piped back into the building through an automated system that will feed the larvae that now reside inside 10,000-gallon tanks in the main nursery, where they’ll develop for about two weeks. Around this time, they are ready to become juveniles, or “spat,” which they do by attaching to a hard surface, such as other oyster shells. “There’s a lot that goes into it,” says Alexander. “All we’re really trying to do is make more oysters, and then get them out into the water.”

Organizing broodstock Photography by Christopher Myers

A short golf cart ride to the water’s edge, the hatchery’s pier protrudes out into the brackish Choptank, seemingly a world away from the Route 50 bridge right up the river that brims with cars bound for Ocean City.

“Welcome to Jellyfish Acres,” she says, gesturing toward the demonstration aquaculture farm below that has recently been riddled with late-summer sea nettles. All around her, 52 setting tanks sit like above-ground swimming pools, some 12 feet in diameter. Each can hold about 100,000 shells—recycled from residents, restaurants, and shucking houses around the bay by the Oyster Recovery Partnership—onto which the spat will be set. In one week, the connected “spat-on-shell” will be hauled into a conveyor belt, onto a buyboat, and then down the bay to public and protected oyster reefs. The hope is that they will grow into adult oysters that eventually reproduce themselves.

Alexander has been involved in these efforts since arriving at Horn Point in 1996, just as oyster restoration began in earnest on the Chesapeake. Three years prior, after decades of wild population decline, the state of Maryland convened an Oyster Roundtable, with 40 stakeholders devising an action plan that would jumpstart both the hatchery and ORP, which houses its massive mountain of shell on site. “Our job is to help Mother Nature get to a place where she can stabilize and sustain on her own,” says Alexander. “I don’t think we’re ever going to get back to where we were—the world has just changed too much, there’s too much human interaction with the water, the sediment, habitat loss, harvesting. But I like to be optimistic. It’s really going to take all of us working together to solve this.”

The waterfront setting tanks. Photography by Christopher Myers

One especially notable project has been in the works since 2010, when President Obama issued an executive order that would include restoring oysters in 10 bay tributaries by 2025, five of which are in Maryland. With the help of partners such as the Department of Natural Resources, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, restoration projects have since been completed in nearby Harris Creek and the Little Choptank River, with the Tred Avon River wrapping up this year and plans now finalized for the St. Mary’s and Manokin rivers. There’s a chance, says Roman, that without this work, the wild oyster harvest would’ve been shut down long ago.

“Oysters are the vital keystone species—historically, they were the kidneys of the Chesapeake,” says Alexander. “I want them to exist into the future. I want my kids to see them. And I can honestly say, when I go home at the end of the day, that I make a difference. ‘Save The Bay,’ you know?”

Shell Scholar

FIVE MINUTES WITH KATE LIVIE, BONA FIDE BIVALVE EXPERT AND BAY HISTORIAN.

First oyster memory?
On Thanksgiving, my pop-pop would set a bushel of oysters on the picnic table out back. When you’re young, you don’t have a sense of squeamishness. He’d shuck them with an old iron shucking knife, lay them out, and you’d just get baby birded, having oysters thrown down your throat. It was the best.

Favorite way to eat them?
Shucking them on the half shell at home, with mignonette because it perfectly complements the natural briny flavor. It’s an old way of enjoying them—even in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the oysters are dancing with vinegar and pepper.

Biggest slurping pet peeve?
When people treat it like it’s a loogie they have to swallow—like it’s a dare. You’ll never really taste it unless you chew it.

Most frequently asked question?
“How can we eat them if they’re filter feeders?” There’s concern that eating oysters is like licking your A.C. They don’t really have an organ like a liver; they’re essentially one tiny intestine attached to a mouth and anus. Oysters can’t digest sediment, which is a carrier for pollutants like phosphorous and nitrogen, so they ultimately spit it out as pseudofeces. What you’re consuming is nominal.

Favorite fun fact?
I like to tell students that oysters have the ability to change sex based on their density and probability of reproduction. They’re fluid, so if there are more female oysters, some will decide to become males, and vice versa, then back again.

What else makes them special?
Oysters can also live up to 20 years in the wild. They grow about an inch a year, so early explorers documented some that were as long as your foot. That’s why they were preferred for a survival food. One will fill you up, and you didn’t even have to chase it.

SAVE YOUR SHELL

ORP has created a Shell Recycling Alliance, with discarded shells from 300-plus restaurants throughout the watershed, including 45 in Baltimore, redeployed onto Chesapeake oyster reefs. Home shuckers can also utilize some 70 public drop-off sites for the remnants of their feasts.

GROW YOUR OWN

Own a waterfront home? Want to feel like an oyster farmer without all the hassle? There are multiple ways to get involved, thanks to “oyster garden” programs through ORP and Chesapeake Bay Foundation, through which citizens can grow their own spat-stocked cages that will then be emptied onto sanctuaries throughout the state.

VOLUNTEER

A collaboration between CBF and the Waterfront Partnership’s Healthy Harbor Initiative, the Great Baltimore Oyster Partnership offers regular volunteer opportunities in Baltimore City, like building, filling, and planting oyster cages at Canton’s Lighthouse Point Marina on October 2. Masks are required. Ages 10 and up.

CLEAN WATER

The future of oysters begins with the water, and there are everyday ways to help protect the estuary. Pick up trash, in your own neighborhood or through stream cleanups. Limit pollutants by skipping lawn fertilizer or supporting local farms that use fewer chemicals. Reduce runoff by installing rain barrels or planting native gardens. And best of all, get out on the bay and appreciate it.