Widow's Hole

An Oyster Revival on Long Island

Nestled in the Peconic waters between Greenport and Shelter Island, Long Island, American oysters are thriving, thanks to Widow's Hole oysters, despite all but becoming extinct in these parts by 1980. Each week, New York's finest eateries, including BLT Fish and BLT Prime, get the pick of the crop delivered the day they were harvested by owner Mike Osinski. It just doesn't get any fresher than that.

A little over a century ago, 30 oyster companies thrived in the square-mile village of Greenport Harbor, all thanks to an eastern oyster called the Crassostrea virginica or American oyster. It was a time when coastal natives subsisted on oysters as an exotic appetizer to a great extent; oysters were a seasonal staple, especially when other food stocks ran low. But diets changed, pollution affected the waters, and a parasite that preyed on seed oysters threatened the entire mollusk population.

Fast-forward to 2003, when Mike Osinski sold his software business in the city and moved his family to Greenport. His waterfront property, overlooking the Greenport harbor, included the rights to the underwater land--basically, his own front yard in the sea. With grand ambition and time on his hands, Mike decided to dive in and attempt to revive the local oyster industry. "It was a lot of trial and error," he candidly admits, while thankfully acknowledging this is now his fifth year to ship oysters successfully. To ensure a healthy population, Mike does not harvest any wild oysters, but instead selects from the more than 300,000 that he cultivates each growing season.

Early each summer, Mike buys "seed," or young oysters, usually four to five millimeters in length, from different hatcheries in the area and suspends them in 50-gallon barrels below docks in Widow's Hole, a small cove of algae-rich water. "Water is pumped through the barrels to expedite growth before we sort through them in August," Mike explains. "We then move those larger than one inch to the bay inside PVC bags shelved in cages." The following spring, the oysters are again sorted, the bags cleaned, and the mollusks again moved--first to intertidal waters where they are exposed to surf and air, and then to deeper waters to fatten. "By September, when they are roughly 18 months old, we begin to harvest the fastest growers, always careful to facilitate shell hardening and resistance to parasites by placing them in the water for a day or two at a time."

American oysters have long been renowned for their unique taste and high meat content, and these oysters are no exception. With constant exposure to the bay's many nutrients that are continually funneled across their beds, Widow's Hole oysters present a tasty representation of the East Coast's finest: delicate yet succulent, with more of a briny edge than some. Largely through his efforts, Mike is putting Greenport back on the map by helping it retrieve its historical claim to fame.