Love the lemon hair nets.
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Good report! 
Holla!
More good stuff! Thanks.
Donât forget the amazing horseradish concoction chef makes, I love that stuff. Added a couple more selections I really enjoy from Connie and Tedâs.
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Hi @BradFord,
Yes! Some of my favorites as well. I love Black Duck Salt Oysters. 
(and the Shigokus I had a couple times were so bright and perfect.)
Iâm going to start doing this as well.
They were very good albeit expensive @ $58/lb 
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Holy shit! Iâm trying to form words around that but canât. $58/#!!!
CA spiny lobster can only be caught by hand or hoop - no traps. Rules are very strict and strictly enforced. So the price reflects the relative scarcity compared to the conventional lobster.
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Thanks, b. I had no idea. It sure does look good.
The season is roughly October-March, so thatâs a limiting factor as well. Canât speak for other States or countries in terms of catching methods. I do remember as a kid eating lots of lobster in Hawaii and Los Angeles. It was almost all spiny lobster.
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As a kid, I ate a lot of bagel pizzas while you were eating spiny lobsters. Your childhood > mine.
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I think what weâve been experiencing with an increase of oyster popularity overall and the type of people that enjoy eating oysters is the desire to know more about the connection. So whatever reasons and correlations you want to make on a socioeconomic level as to why that is happening, the producers have stepped up and responded by providing that information they crave and more and the chefs and staff are sharing it.
Nowadays it seems like the chefs want some staple go-toâs to have on offer but theyâre more open to using something new and uncharted even if it means going out of their comfort zone.
But back to your previous point about types of oysters in general with regards to marketing and because you mentioned the Coromandels, there are actually 4-5 producers in NZ who are exporting live oysters to the states. 4 out of the 5 of those are using the Crassostrea gigas which is a pacific oyster, the other one being a Ostrea chilensis or Dredge oyster or Bluff or Flat or the now defunct branding name of Tio Point. Bluff oysters are the wild oyster harvested down near, you guessed it, Bluff, while the Tio points used to be farmed from the northern part of the South Island of NZ but have shut down as of last year to restart the harvesting process. The rest of the live Pacific oyster export producers are located in the North Island. Coromandels are of course located in the Coromandel Peninsula which is a marketed name by a company who produces them. A bit west of there(1hr around the coast) you have Clevedon Coast oysters which are their own company and brand and from there you have the newest entry to the live oyster export market 2hr drive north from Clevedon, which produces product out of the Kaipara Harbour and are marketed as Kaipara Oysters Probably the least known oysters at this time come from Orongo Bay and those are the Kiwa oysters.
These are producers that are fairly artisan in the sense that they are not large producers on the global scale but they have a story to tell and each one of them believes that their oyster is better than their neighbors but they respect each others oyster game to a certain degree.
All that said, caught me on a slow Wednesday in October, the oyster market is constantly changing and this is only a snippet of the overall picture. Those oysters mentioned, believe it or not all have their own unique story and taste and the latter of course changes throughout the year so I urge you all to try them out but opposite season to our local oysters so look for them to be their strongest from June till about a couple weeks ago. Keep in mind, there are larger and older seafood institutions that are producing oysters for export in frozen form but they are sold as half shell pacific oysters and usually donât have a story or name attached to them for obvious reasons.
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When I first encountered these as a little kid with limited vocab, thought they were âfakeâ oysters⌠
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Bluffins! Hard to get your hands on in NZ let alone in LA!
It was ages ago; offered in the room service menu. Recollect being very pleased with them
No such thing as bagel pizzas when I was a kid. Obviously, my childhood was much more ancient then yours.
We also ate a lot of abalone.
(Think Billy Crystal/Eddie Murphy old Jewish man voice) âYou know - we used to just pull them off the rocks; yank 'um out of the sea. And they were for free!â (#butnotkosher)
My cousins in Hawaii and and family friends in SoCal used to snorkel for lobsters - plentiful back then. And spinys were the standard in restaurants in Hawaii.
Abalone were literally found all over the rocky shorelines of SoCal back in the day. I was a toddler but remember my parents and our familyâs friends going on these abalone foraging trips.
The Japanese community also did a lot of sharing of any bounty that they came across. Whether itâs produce from the garden or catches from the ocean, everyone shared.
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