At San Francisco’s nostalgia-inducing Swan Oyster Depot, the menu includes oysters from both coasts: you might choose among Kumamotos from Humboldt Bay, California; Miyagis from Puget Sound, Washington; Blue Points from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. But if you go to the restaurant, with its marble counter and 18 wooden stools, half of which date back to the 1800s, you might be able to try the favorite oyster of one of the restaurant owners. “If I had one oyster I could eat from anywhere in the world, it would be the Olympia. It’s a very unique oyster, with a very briny, very mineral-y, almost coppery taste,” says Steve Sancimino.
Sancimino loves to tell interested customers that the Olympia is San Francisco Bay’s native oyster and that the miners came and ate them all. Then, two of the biggest growers—John Stillwell Morgan and Michael Bolan Moraghan—cultivated them in places like Oyster Point, in South San Francisco, and the East Bay. But during the gold rush, the sludge from hydraulic mining came down from the rivers and smothered the oyster beds. “When they hear the story, people go crazy for them,” says Sancimino.
However, the history of the hometown oyster may be more about quiet resilience than boom and bust. When throngs of gold-seekers arrived in San Francisco in the mid-1800s, they definitely brought their appetite for oysters with them. But the ’49ers, while guilty of many things, may not have actually plundered and then destroyed the bay’s native oyster beds. Andrew Cohen, director of the Center for Research on Aquatic Bioinvasions, who has been investigating the story intermittently for more than a decade, thinks that the bay’s wild-oyster population could be about the same as or even greater than it was back in the day. “There’s no evidence to support the idea that native oysters were more abundant in the bay when the Europeans first showed up and were wiped out during the gold rush,” he says. “People who are trying to restore them are laboring under a misconception.”
Restoration-minded scientists in California agree that the historical record is spotty, but the overarching reasons to support native oysters are sound. “Oysters have always been present in the bay, and we know that they have benefits. I’m not sure it’s important whether they were enormously abundant 50 years ago, 500 years ago, or 5,000 years ago,” says Ted Grosholz, a professor of ecology at UC Davis. “Oyster restoration moves the needle for biodiversity, water quality, and other positive impacts.”
With the world’s biodiversity is really the right term for what they’re doing, there is a sea change in how we are thinking about the environment at the water’s edge. Once sneered upon for being small and inconsequential, the West Coast’s Olympia—or Oly—is pointing the way to a more delicious, ecologically rich future.
