How one restaurateur began growing his own custom oysters
Andrew Carmines grew up in Hudson’s Seafood on the Docks restaurant on Hilton Head, which his family purchased in 1975. He started in the restaurant at an entry level position in 2007, later becoming the restaurant’s general manager in 2009.
The restaurant itself has a rich history. When it started out as Hudson’s Oyster Factory in the 1920s, the location was a seafood processing plant where owner J.B. Hudson and crew shucked, packaged and shipped fresh oysters up the East Coast. Over the years, the restaurant replaced the factory. The current building is literally built on top of the mountain of discarded shells that the factory produced.
When October’s historic rains produced king tides along the South Carolina coast, Hudson’s was not spared. Water flowed underneath the structure, and there was 8-12” of water in the restaurant. Interestingly, while replacing air conditioning ducts during the clean-up process, the original wood ceiling in one of the dining rooms was exposed and refinished.
The restaurant celebrated its grand re-opening just last month.
A company is born
Carmines prides himself on sourcing as much as he can as locally as possible. To that end, he formed the Shell Ring Oyster Company in 2013 to be able to grow single select oysters for Hudson’s.
When he started Shell Ring, he asked himself: “If by farming my own oysters, could I help improve our environment, stimulate local businesses, and negate the middle man and create a better-tasting product?”
The answer was yes.
Getting the company off the ground was “a learning process,” Carmines said. He had to get permits from the S.C. Department of Natural Resources and approval from the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Coast Guard to set oyster beds in Port Royal Sound. He leases rights from the state.
He and Shell Ring business partner Rob Rowe started hand-building cages for the seed oysters that they had ordered from a hatchery in Virginia. The plan was to grow out 250,000 seed oysters in fall 2013 for a 2014 harvest. But during Shell Ring’s set-up process, a moratorium was placed on seed oysters from outside the state of South Carolina. Carmines had to start over with the permitting process to find an in-state supplier.
He turned to Bill Cox of Yonges Island Fish Company, who has been growing and supplying clam seed for mariculture businesses for 22 years. Oysters and shrimp were secondary interests.
“There’s a small, but growing, mariculture industry in South Carolina.” Cox said. “Over the past five or six years, even more in the past couple of years, folks are (farm-raising) oysters in South Carolina.”
Cox was able to supply Carmines with 70,000 seed oysters, which were then placed in grow-out cages in Port Royal Sound, just a 10-minute boat ride from Hudson’s.
The nutrient rich environment of Port Royal Sound, where the Chechessee, Harbor and Broad rivers converge, is a perfect location for raising oysters.
Like fine wines, the taste and texture of an oyster is influenced by its environment. The salinity at Port Royal Sound is static, producing briny tasting oysters that Carmines’ customers prefer. “People are tasting every little bit of what the oyster is made of” when they have an oyster from Hudson’s, says Carmines. And, he is able to get hand-selected fresh oysters from ocean to table within an hour.
That time from ocean to table makes a big difference in the taste for the customer, says Carmines.
Improving the environment
The 70,000 oysters filter 15-20 gallons of water a day, approximately 1.4 million gallons a day or 500 million gallons a year. Redistribution of discarded oyster shells around the restaurant’s property, with help and guidance from DNR, can help create a natural and safe habitat for more oysters. It is Carmines’ goal to one day lease land across the water from Hudson’s to raise both single select and wild oysters — so Hudson’s customers can have a true ocean to table dining experience.
Carmines also wants to eventually grow Shell Ring into an operation that will produce 450,000 oysters a year for Hudson’s with possibly more for sale elsewhere.
Hilton Head Island Seafood Festival
When: Through Saturday
Where: Various locations at Hilton Head Island. Highlights include Lowcountry Seafood Experience on the Water, 10 a.m. or 2 p.m. daily from Hudson’s Seafood House on the Docks, $50/person, (843) 304-2878; Beefsteak All-You-Can-Eat, 5 p.m. Thursday, Sunset Landing at Skull Creek Boathouse, $125/person, (843) 681-3663; Sunset Lowcountry Boil on the Tammy Jane, 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Hudson’s Seafood House on the Docks, $50/person, (843) 384-7833; Oyster Roast + Pig Picking, 5:30 p.m. Friday, Honey Horn Plantation, $35/advance, $45/door, (843) 681-2772; Seafood Fest, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Shelter Cove Community Park, $6/person, kids under 10 free.
Information: hiltonheadseafoodfestival.com or www.facebook.com/hhiseafoodfest.
Single select or cluster?
When you think of South Carolina oysters, most people immediately think of the clusters that come out of the area along the May River near Bluffton or the wild oysters beds along the coast.
Single select oysters are oysters raised as individual oysters from “seed.”
Bill Cox, of Yonges Island Fish Company, explains it this way: Oysters can be raised naturally, letting Mother Nature control the spawning process twice a year; or you can raise oysters in a hatchery.
In the hatchery, the temperature of the water is controlled and modified on the separate tanks of male and female oysters to simulate the ideal condition for spawning. The females will produce eggs in their tank, the males produce sperm in another. After fertilizing the eggs, larvae begin to form within 24-48 hours. For 18-21 days, the larvae are fed and kept in clean water that is drained daily, and the larvae are measured daily under the microscope. After 21 days, what is called “the eye” begins to form. “Eyed” larvae are fed and measured daily and when they reach a preferred size, they are transferred to tanks containing cultch – crushed oyster shells that provide a hard surface ideal for growth.
The idea is that a single, eyed seed oyster will attach to a single piece of cultch and grow, un-clustered, to maturity. After two weeks in the cultch tank, the microscopic eyed seed oyster should have reached 1-millimeter in diameter. At this point, any excess cultch is removed and the seed oyster is transferred to natural seawater where they begin to grow rapidly. The seed oysters are then shipped out, to be grown out at various oyster farms such as Carmines’ Shell Ring.
The hatchery’s seed oysters are triploid, meaning that the process of creation causes the egg to contribute two sets of chromosomes and the sperm one set – an event that can occur naturally, without the aid of a hatchery, and take 12-14 months to mature.
Natural oysters, usually clustered, are diploid – the sperm and egg each produce one set of chromosomes – and take 18-24 months to mature.
Triploids have a tendency to remain firm, full and sweet throughout the summer when the diploids are spawning. The triploids continue to maintain those characteristics (because they are essentially sterile), while the diploids get smaller and watery in the fall after the reproduction process.
This story was originally published March 1, 2016 at 11:53 PM with the headline "How one restaurateur began growing his own custom oysters."