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Thomison, 19, a recent graduate of the nearby Academy for College and Career Exploration (ACCE), has proven to be a rare find: an oyster shucker with the talent, strength, work ethic and patience to feed a restaurant full of discerning mollusk-lovers.
Sometimes Patrick Hudson, the owner of True Chesapeake, can’t believe his luck in finding this oyster-shucking phenom. Hudson opened the restaurant in 2019, stocking it with oysters grown on the harvesting farm he started in 2012 on St. Jerome Creek in southern Maryland. By that time, the Chesapeake Bay, once capable of yielding millions of bushels of oysters a year, was oystered-out – a decline that had started in the 1970s. Farmed oysters, Hudson had told himself and his investors, were the sustainable and delicious future of quality seafood restaurants in the region. State lawmakers thought so, too, making oyster farming legal starting in 2009. But when Hudson opened the restaurant, experienced shuckers were in short supply. The decades-long chain of one generation teaching the next had been broken. “It’s kind of a lost trade,” says Hudson.
Shucking an oyster is a little bit physics, a little bit love, and a lot of attention to detail. By 2019, the few experienced shuckers still working were close to retirement. They hadn’t taught potential successors how to grip the bulb at the end of the specially designed knife, how to insert the knife tip into the tightly clasped shell, how to wiggle and turn that knife, how to assess that each oyster is healthy and sweet, how to slice the muscle holding the meat to the shell. And they certainly hadn’t taught anyone how do it again and again, 999 more times in a single night. (Read more.)
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