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Wilmington combines fascinating history, a lively food scene, and easy access to the outdoors—a perfect spot for a weekend getaway.

by Gear Patrol Studios on June 13, 2023 | Presented by VisitNC

Where can you explore a preserved WWII-era battleship, window shop through a charming downtown steeped in centuries of history, spend an afternoon fishing (or paddleboarding) and then dig into some mouthwatering oysters? Wilmington, North Carolina.

Tucked between the Cape Fear River and the mighty Atlantic Ocean, Wilmington might not have the name recognition of other East Coast hot spots, but this under-the-radar destination is well worth a visit. The Port City offers easy access to the outdoors, one-of-a-kind restaurants and lots of culture, including the gorgeous Airlie Gardens and world-class art at the Cameron Art Museum.

Considering a visit? Wilmington International Airport, located just outside of town, has direct flights from several cities in the eastern U.S. While you can always book an Airbnb, Wilmington has several excellent boutique hotels within its downtown core: The Front Street Inn offers a picturesque garden for guests, Arrive Wilmington mixes flavorful cocktails at its Gazebo Bar and the beautifully decorated Dreamers by DW provides a modern twist on the classic bed and breakfast.

Make sure you carve out some time to explore the area’s culinary scene. Manna is a Wilmington mainstay thanks to its innovative take on New American cuisine, and in addition to classic pub grub, the nearby Front Street Brewery has the largest whiskey selection in the region. Indochine serves up delicious Vietnamese and Thai food in a colorful dining room (plus a lush backyard), and Casey’s Buffet is a one-stop tour for Southern cooking: pile your plate high with pulled pork, fried chicken, and if you’re feeling adventurous, pig’s feet.

To help you get the most out of your visit, here are a few different ways to explore Wilmington and its surroundings.

By Oyster

Love shellfish? You’ve come to the right place. Bring your appetite and head out on the NC Oyster Trail, a comprehensive self-guided tour of North Carolina’s thriving seafood industry. Sample delicious local shellfish at a variety of seafood restaurants, hop in a kayak to learn about the oyster beds of Bald Head Creek and even tour a working oyster farm at the Cape Fear Oyster Co. (while snacking on some of the freshest oysters you’ll ever eat).

by John Jeremiah Sullivan on May 29, 2023 | Reprinted from Our State

During a day in the marsh with a professional oysterwoman, a Wilmington writer who was born and raised in the Midwest learns to stop worrying and love the briny flavor of fresh, wild oysters.

Earlier this year, I was having raw oysters at Manna in downtown Wilmington and chatting with the bartender, an affable, bearded guy in his mid-40s. We were talking about seafood, and it was evident that he knew a fair amount. “You seem to be really into fishing,” I said at one point. He reached down, undid the cuffs of his shirtsleeves, and rolled them up. His arms were covered in realistic blue-green tattoos of various finfishes and shellfishes and tackle. “You could say so,” he said.

The oysters that night seemed especially good, and the bartender explained why: They were wild as opposed to “farmed,” or cultivated. They’d been harvested on Masonboro Island, off the coast of the Cape Fear peninsula, not even 10 miles to the southeast of where we sat. On the menu, they were listed as “Masonboro Wild Selects.”

To understand the pleasure that I take in eating oysters in my adopted hometown of Wilmington, you’d need to come from a place like I do, on the borderlands of Indiana and Kentucky, where the nearest coast lay along the Patoka Lake reservoir. You didn’t want to mess with oysters so far into the interior. Too risky. Only when I moved to North Carolina 20 years ago did I come to appreciate how special raw oysters are and how different they can be from one another. The oysters we eat here are so fresh that you can taste the seawater from the deck of the boat they came in on.

I had always assumed that half of the raw oysters found in local restaurants were wild, but it turns out that only a small percentage are. Nationally, the figure is tiny, like 5 percent. That has a lot to do with the obliteration of their habitat. In a place like Wilmington, situated in a fertile spot on the coast, the number might flutter upward during peak season, but not by much. That makes sense. Most restaurants value consistency above almost anything, and an oyster farmer can turn out a satisfying and essentially identical product week after week. But wild oysters possess more interest, flavor-wise. While the cultivated ones are often grown on a type of scaffolding, or “growing rack,” in watery environments where conditions are relatively fixed, wild oysters bear in their bodies the full vicissitudes of the sea: the rolling and tumbling, the greater variety of minerals that filter through from the marshes.

My bartender said that he likes to harvest wild oysters himself, prospecting for them in a skiff. He locates the beds at the edges of marshes and along the barrier islands. “My biggest trick for finding them,” he told me, “is to catch them spitting.” I asked what he meant. “When you see the tide go out and the water go down, and they start to become uncovered,” he explained, “you’ll see them literally start spitting, like somebody spitting into a spittoon.” He paused. “If you really want to know about oysters,” he said, “you need to talk to Äna Shellem.” He described her as someone whose mission is to raise awareness about wild oysters and other shellfish.

“Is that her real name?” I asked. “Shellem?”

“That’s her real name.”

“That’s my real name,” Äna Shellem says, by way of hello, when she picks up the phone. She likes to get that out of the way early on. Her maiden name is Gilmore. She’s in her 30s, tall, with a round, friendly face and blonde braids. She was born in Tennessee, became a child actor and stage performer, then lived for a while in New York City, where she did some time in the fine-dining world. In 2012, she met a man named Jon Shellem, who co-owns a bar down here, Red Dogs in Wrightsville Beach. Jon was living on a sailboat at the time and doing lots of shellfish harvesting. With him, Äna experienced for the first time what she calls “the feeling the marsh gives me.”

She married Jon, got her fishing and dealer’s licenses, and started selling wild shellfish directly to local restaurants. These days, she’s one of eastern North Carolina’s main boutique shellfish suppliers. In what surely ranks among the least difficult decisions in the history of company-naming, she chose to call her business Shell’em Seafood.

One morning a few weeks later, I find myself riding with Shellem in a small boat out from the marina at Wrightsville Beach. It’s late March, the moon is new, and the wind is blowing from the northeast. The water level is high in the marshes. We cruise along smoothly on turquoise water under a cloudless sky, out toward Masonboro Island. “We don’t have a great tide today,” Shellem says.

When you live in downtown Wilmington, as I do — 30 miles up the Cape Fear River from where it empties into the sea — it’s possible to forget how close you are to the undeveloped barrier islands that line the coast. As Shellem steers, we pass the last few clusters of big waterfront houses and enter the wild. Pelicans fly parallel to our path as if wanting to know where we’re headed. I am transported in a way that seems disproportionate to the nearness of these untouched beaches. A short drive, a quick boat ride, and it’s another world.

Shellem pays daily attention to the moon and the wind and the tide. They tend to determine the amount of time that she can work in a particular area. If there’s a wind from the northeast, as there is today, she might have only 45 minutes to wade a hundred yards to the center of a marsh, where she knows the shellfish are, and return safely to the boat. “The childhood fear of quicksand comes back quick,” she says, “when you’re alone and sink into the marsh up to your ribs.”

After about 20 minutes, she slows the boat, and we putter up to a little spit of muddy sand at the edge of a marsh. The beach is covered in gray oyster shells. Most are dead — that is to say, empty — but a certain number still have the living animal inside. I can hardly tell the difference between the two, but Shellem’s eye instantly singles out the live ones. And that’s how she refers to them: as singles.

As we crunch around in our boots, Shellem explains how the oyster bed formed. At first, you have feathers, young oysters with relatively straight, thin shells that “grow out in a very ugly, blooming-onion kind of way,” she says. As the clusters are tossed by storms, or the wake of boats, or the shuffling of sandbars, the oysters shift enough that some shells break off and tumble to the bottom of the pile. “That’s where I find the nuggets that I like,” Shellem says, “the ones that are thick enough.”

Some restaurants serve the younger feathers. “You can sell them to fish shops for use in stews that feed a bunch of people quickly,” she says. But Shellem deals mainly with restaurants that serve raw oysters, so she hunts for the singles. It’s not just their thickness that’s attractive to her, but also the shape. As the oysters grow and are tossed around in the ocean, their shells become twisted by the changes in position. They develop deeper cups, where a juicier mollusk can develop. “It’s not going to be stringy or anything,” she says. “It’ll be more velvety, more of a full-mouth feel.” Another thing: The meat-to-shell proportion is better. “Most chefs will tell you that you eat with your eyes first,” Shellem says. She keeps her eyes out for shells with what she calls “that beautiful mermaid tail,” knowing that when they’re opened, they’ll likely display a “purple pearly sheen.”

Shellem moves through the marshes with a culling tool, a sort of small machete that she’s customized by putting notches at every three inches along the back end. The law stipulates that wild oysters can be harvested only after they’ve reached a length of three inches, so with her homemade knife, Shellem is able to measure as she goes. “I call it my cluster buster,” she says.

I pick up an oyster that looks roughly like the ones she’s gathering. “Is this one?” I ask, like a kid with a rock that he hopes is an arrowhead.

“Good job!” she says. “And you cut your hand, too, like a real marsh boy.”

I look down and see that one of my fingers is bleeding. I hadn’t realized how sharp the shells were when I reached for it.

“Do you want to eat this one?” she asks.

“You mean, like, right here?”

“Yeah!” she says.

“Um, sure. Is that … how you do it?”

She pulls out a pocketknife, inserts the blade at the base, and then works it along the edge, prying the two halves apart until the shell pops open. I hesitate before tipping the oyster back into my mouth. Shellem watches closely.

“Oh my God,” I exclaim. “That was so good!” It’s salty and — to borrow her word — velvety, full of what can only be described as oyster flavor (the Japanese have an untranslatable term for it). I’m surprised at how surprised I am to like it. I confess to Shellem that I’d always figured restaurants were doing something to the oysters to make them more palatable. I don’t know what I thought that something was. The mignonette? The ice?

“That’s the beauty,” she says. “They come out of the ocean tasting like that.”

As the boat moves away from the marsh and back toward Wrightsville Beach, I ask Shellem to define that “feeling of the marsh” — the sensation she’d spoken of when we first talked by phone, the feeling that changed her life and turned her into a professional oysterwoman. Part of it, she says, is “the sheer empowerment and confidence of driving a boat on your own.” On top of that, Shellem says, she loves having “a job that I know will end with a work of art on some chef’s plate.” But most important: “The feeling the marsh gives me is that I can always feed my family. I can always feed my friends.”

I know what she means, if only in a vicarious way. So much of the food that we eat has, at best, an abstract provenance, words on a label. These oysters have come straight from the sea, 10 miles from my house. As I just learned on the beach, slurping down the freshest oyster that one could find, they hardly need touching before they’re edible and delicious.

Shellem gives me a bag to take home, and I serve the oysters that night. The kids seem impressed — they’ve never seen me bring home food that wasn’t from the grocery store. The effect, for me, is one of existing more intensely in the place where I live. Tasting and becoming one with it. The experience of ordering raw oysters at Manna will never be the same. It will be better — and, like the shell-cups of the singles that Äna Shellem harvests in the marshes, deeper.

by Katie Mosher on April 19, 2023 | Reprinted for NC Sea Grant

The 2023 North Carolina Oyster Summit will convene on May 9 and 10 at the Marbles Kids Museum in Raleigh. North Carolina Sea Grant is among the sponsors for the summit that brings together oyster researchers, managers, growers, harvesters, restaurateurs, restoration practitioners, state legislators, educators and others.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation is hosting the event to highlight an update for the NC Oyster Blueprint. For 20 years the Blueprint has guided partnerships focusing on restoration, protection, and growing the state’s oyster resources. This summit’s theme is: Resilient Coasts for Future Roasts.

“The NC Oyster Summit is the premier opportunity to get up to speed on our state’s oysters,” says Jane Harrison, North Carolina Sea Grant’s coastal economist and co-founder of the North Carolina Oyster Trail. “Sea Grant has been a long-time partner not only for the NC Oyster Summits, but also over many decades of oyster research and outreach.”

The NC Oyster Trail will be the topic of an oyster tourism panel on May 10. Ghost Fleet Oyster Co. will share their experiences as oyster growers and also discuss what it’s been like to open their farm for agritourism.

In addition, Eric Herbst, North Carolina Sea Grant’s coastal aquaculture specialist, will serve with partners on a panel highlighting successes and challenges for oyster mariculture. Speakers include Chris Matteo, president of the N.C. Shellfish Growers Association, and Tal Ben-Horin, a shellfish pathologist from NC State University. The session also will provide an update on the NC Shellfish Farming Academy based at Carteret Community College.

“When I think of resilience and North Carolina’s coast, two things immediately come to mind, shellfish farmers and oysters. In spite of three hurricanes and a global pandemic, our state’s shellfish aquaculture production has more than doubled in the last five years,” Herbst notes.

“Wild harvests are trending up as well. Oysters and clams are inherently resilient bivalves. But the success also is a testimony to the efforts by shellfish growers along with local, regional, state, and national organizations, institutions and agencies. All are working together and toward a common goal.”

For NC Oyster Summit registration and other details, visit: https://www.nccoast.org/event/n-c-oyster-summit-resilient-coasts-future-roasts/

“In addition to learning from the experts panels, you can sample oysters from along our coast, and even experience a shucking competition at the reception” Harrison adds.

by Mike Wagoner on February 2023 | Reprinted from Island Review

Hooray for the “R” months and the oysters they bring us. Oysters are among my favorite seafood delights. You might say that oysters are one of those foods that should just be savored … without putting too much analytical thought
into the juicy-goo of it. A wild and zany guy named Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) of Dublin, Ireland, once suggested: “He was a bold man who first ate an oyster.” Jeremy and Carol Stevens of Simply Oysters & Seafood in London, England, tell us that oysters have been around since the days when dinosaurs roamed – some 200 million years ago. “Archaeological evidence shows traces of scorch marks on ancient oyster shells consistent with fire,” according to the Stevenses. “This suggests that humans placed oysters on the embers of a fire or heated stones, and then cooked them for a few minutes until the oyster shells popped open.” “Jonathan Swift overcame his fear of oysters to become an enthusiastic advocate of oysters,” they said. “In Swift’s most famous book, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ (1726), the main character became shipwrecked at Lilliput, where he collected and ate oysters on the beach.” “Swift even penned instructions on how to boil oysters: ‘Take oysters, wash their shells clean, then put the oysters into an earthen pot, then put the pot into a kettle of water, and let them
boil. Your oysters are boiled in their own liquor and not mixed with water.”

Christopher Joyce, science correspondent with National Public Radio, said the first “oyster dinner” by humans may have occurred in caves at Pinnacle Point on the southern coast of South Africa. He cited research conducted by Dr. Curtis Marean, an anthropologist at Arizona State University. Stuart Walton, a science writer in Brighton, England, said Dr. Marean’s findings may mean that oysters “actually saved mankind and hastened our evolution from beast to man.” “Was the first human to eat an oyster fearless or starving Neither,” Walton said. “Any revulsion for, or fear of oysters, is a modern construct from people who wear shirts, skirts and suits.

The reality is that our ancestors would have gorged themselves on oysters every chance they got.” “The oyster is one of nature’s most bountiful foods, rich in minerals, protein, vitamin D, zinc, iron and copper as well as possessing high levels of vitamin C, phosphorus, niacin and riboflavin. But it doesn’t stop there. They’re also rich in beneficial antioxidants, healthy cholesterol and omega-3 fatty acids. Besides, oysters are easy to harvest and so soft that they’re easy to eat for all age groups.” The Greeks and Romans considered oysters to be a delicacy. In Greek mythology, Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, emerged from a foamy sea on an oyster shell. The Greeks became the first to cultivate oysters by scattering “broken pottery pieces where oysters grew to get the oyster babies to attach.”

During the 19th century, oysters were sold at every street corner in London. Oysters were also very popular with bars since they were seen as a cheap food to serve alongside liquor and beer. Such establishments came to be known as “oyster saloons,” and the popularity soon extended to America’s large northern cities. In the South, the term was “oyster house,” said Robert F. Moss of Charleston, S.C., an author of numerous books on Southern food and drink. “Being on the coast with an active port, Charleston was the heart of oyster-eating in the Carolinas before the Civil War,” Moss said. “Hundreds of bushels of oysters came into Charleston from
Beaufort, N.C.”

Oysters in English Literature

By the 1820s, an “Oyster Row” of restaurants in Charleston, S.C., was thriving. They were selling more oysters than beef steaks, according to Suzannah Smith Miles of Charleston Living Magazine. One of the major players was David Truesdell, an entrepreneur who had relocated from New York City. He ran the best “oyster house” in Charleston and also perfected oyster farming on 200 acres of land that he leased on nearby Sullivan’s Island close to Breach Inlet. The locals dubbed Truesdell as the “Oyster King.” Miles wrote: “He had shown that, with care, oysters could be developed, improved upon and raised with the same scientific experimentation that cotton planters used to develop a finer product.” “The unstoppable Truesdell accomplished what he set out to do. He made a tidy fortune through oysters. If one could give a fitting epitaph for this unique waterman, it would be that, indeed, ‘the world was his oyster.’”

Curiously, that phrase was coined by legendary British poet and dramatist William Shakespeare in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” a comedy published in 1602. Ed Goldswain, who taught English literature for four decades in London, England, is a Shakespearian scholar. He explained: “‘The world is your oyster’ saying is often offered as encouragement to young people about to embark on adult life. It simply means that everything is open to them, and if one is lucky, he or she could encounter something special.” “If you have an oyster, there is a chance that there may be a pearl in it. A nice fresh oyster can be hard to open, but once opened, it’s good,” Goldswain said. “And perhaps it may have a pearl in it, which would be a valuable addition to one’s life.” “So when we set out to seek our fortune, the pearl is the good luck we may have. If we’re lucky we will find it,” Goldswain said. The odds of finding a natural pearl in an oyster are said to be 1 in 10,000. The odds of it being a pearl of gemstone quality are 1 in 1,000,000.

“Life can be hard, but if you keep at it, it will sometimes unexpectedly give you a reward,” Goldswain said. “That’s why
Shakespeare’s original quote ‘the world’s mine oyster’ has evolved into a favourite metaphor for life.” Getting back to Truesdell, his oyster farming operation was “pearl worthy,” wrote Robert F. Moss. “Borrowing techniques from rice planting, he built brick abutments with floodgates to control the flow of the tide into his beds, which allowed him to cultivate and harvest even during high tides. “Truesdell’s beds were a tempting target for poachers, and the oyster farmer was reported to have stood guard nightly over his crop with a blunderbuss and a brace of pistols.”

Oyster Experts Delve into the ‘R’ Month Rule of Thumb

Can you really only eat oysters in “R” months of September through April?

Southern Living magazine recently asked Sheri Castle of Chapel Hill, N.C., to check it out. She’s a highly respected cookbook author, recipe developer and cooking teacher. “The rationale behind skipping oysters during the warmest months was to avoid oysters that might not taste good or, even worse, be unsafe to eat,” Castle reported. “Back when we had only wild oysters, summertime was a factor on several fronts. Wild oysters spawn in the summer when the water is warmest.” “In many places, oyster season closed during that time period to give the oysters opportunity to reproduce, yielding a more generous and sustainable oyster harvest later in the year. Another factor is that spawning oysters are small, watery and have an unpleasant off-taste.” Christine Gallary of San Francisco, a contributor to the popular Kitchn food-focused website, drew a similar “R” month assignment.

Rowan Jacobsen, author of “A Geography of Oysters,” confirmed that when spawning, oysters tend to “get soft and rank.” He said that prior to refrigeration, “it wasn’t safe to eat raw animals in wooden barrels that had baked all day on the docks.” “Oysters have to be refrigerated the moment they come out of the water and stored at that temperature all the way to your plate,” Jacobsen said. “Most oysters still taste much better in fall and winter than they do in summer,” he said. “Oysters taste best out of cold water, so I say to follow the frost line – southern oysters in late winter and early spring, northern oysters in fall.” He encourages everybody to feel comfortable “eating oysters from anywhere” during the holidays – from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day. Castle said that “times, and oysters, have changed, and now it’s perfectly all right to eat oysters in May, June, July and August. The United States has made huge strides in the safe and sustainable harvesting of oysters.” “The popularity and availability of farmed oysters has surged,” she said. “Cold water farms can produce edible oysters year-round. On farms in warmer waters, the oyster breeds are often triploids, which means they are sterile, similar to seedless fruits and vegetables. Oysters that never spawn cannot suffer the flavor and quality issues caused by summertime spawning.”

C.J. Husk, who is the brand ambassador and “oyster dude” at Island Creek Oysters in Duxbury, Mass., told Gallary that “these days, the ‘R’ in oystering stands for ‘refrigeration.’” Chris Sherman, company president at Island Creek, said the
best way to store raw, unshucked oysters at home is to place them in a bowl in the refrigerator. “Cover them with a damp dish cloth so they don’t dry out. They don’t have to sit on ice, but make sure the refrigerator temperature is around 38 or 39 degrees. For the best result, eat oysters within a week of harvest.” The old “R-Rule” is simply out of style, stated Tyler Chadwick of Carteret County, founder and owner of Carolina Gold Oyster Company, located north of Beaufort on Merrimon Road. Today’s technology and research have made it safe to consume oysters in the “non-R months.” “Let’s move into the now and future in the world of oysters. Enjoy oysters every month of the year,” he said. Ryan Speckman, a seafood distributor based in Raleigh, said what really seals the deal is that there’s been a tremendous upswing in the number of chefs who are willing to put oysters on their menus year-round.