Perhaps it was, as Jonathan Swift once wrote, a bold man who first ate an oyster, but it wasn’t a hard sell for me to join Four Seasons Hotel New Orleans’s new Oysters Take Flight experience. On this bright, balmy morning, I set out from the 34-story hotel overlooking the Mississippi River for Southern Seaplane airport in nearby Belle Chasse. From there, a veteran pilot guides our six-seater Cessna 206 up and over Louisiana’s lace-like coastal wetlands and out into the Gulf of Mexico. After a short flight with spectacular views in every direction, he gently sets the aircraft down on the lapping waves just off Grand Isle, the state’s only inhabited barrier island.
In a diminutive boat stands Ryan Anderson of Little Moon Oyster Ranch, waiting to take us to his floating farm. Nicknamed “Oyster Daddy,” he meticulously tends 400,000 oysters as they grow from seeds to mature bivalves ready to be shucked and slurped in restaurants around the Big Easy. A welcoming spread of pimiento cheese, crackers, caviar, Champagne, and Bloody Marys awaits us in the boat—just the first course of this luxury oyster adventure, which will culminate in dinner at the hotel’s Chemin à la Mer this evening.
Anderson climbs overboard into the chest-high water to find the perfect oysters. “All the East Coast oysters, up into Nova Scotia and down into the Gulf, are the exact same species,” he explains as the water laps around him. “It’s just where they are and how and what they eat that changes the ultimate shape and flavor.” Rather than letting nature take its course, which can yield less perfectly shaped oysters, aquaculture farmers strategically cultivate their crops, sorting and manually tumbling them to achieve strong, symmetrical shells and pristine flavor.
Anderson’s former life as a sommelier informs his style. “Just like wine, where the different regions and soil have an impact, different salinity, temperatures, and nutrients of the water can change the flavor from week to week,” he says. He gamely instructs me on how to shuck my first oyster, positioning the knife carefully in the hinge to free the top shell from the bottom without losing any of the salty liquor around the meat. It’s love at first bite: The bivalve’s silky texture and briny, sweet flavor—delicious on its own without any accouterments—is more than worth the trip.
This article appears in the Fall 2024 issue of Southbound.
