NEW ORLEANS — June 26, 2014 – For the first time in its 100-year-plus history, one of New Orleans' biggest oyster dealers has resorted to importing oysters to subsidize demand for the shellfish delicacy, which in recent years, dealers say, has become hard to harvest in the northern Gulf of Mexico.
Al Sunseri, co-owner of P&J Oyster Company in the French Quarter and a member of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force, said Tuesday that his company has shucked and sold fresh Louisiana oysters for more than 130 years.
In his 35 years with the company, he said he's never seen anything like today's market.
"We're shucking a 10th of the oysters that we used to shuck," Sunseri said. "It's not even in the ballpark, and there are months that go by where we don't have any product to shuck."
He was in his office, a few blocks from where restaurant owners and seafood industry leaders held a news conference promoting an expanding program to recycle oyster shells in an effort to rebuild oyster seeding areas and help fight coastal erosion.
Sunseri said his company handled up to 25,000 oysters a day before the BP oil spill in 2010 and now only shucks a few thousand a day — some days not any.
He rarely has enough product for what was once a thriving retail, shipping and grocery business, he said.
Read the full story at the Sun Herald