The Oyster Blog

The official Anderson's Neck blog with progress updates on our mission to Save the Bay One Oyster at a Time. We will notify you when we post new articles if you Join Our Mailing List.

As you may know, we have been locked in an epic 3 year bureacratic cluster with the City of Richmond in an attempt to build a brewery with what we hoped would be a bad ass raw bar in RVA. Unbelievably, we are still waiting for someone in the City with a Mr. Rodger’s like voice to return the call and ask us: “Won’t you be my neighbor?” However, the call never seems to come. Well, we aren’t going to sit around and wait anymore. So we are going to take a hot sanitizing shower to clean off the taint, apply a detox mud mask, and find our inner Chi. We’re moving on. Hasta la vista, Baby.

So what the heck are we going to do? Well as a start, we are going to expand our oyster operations with a new, secondary oyster farm site where we will grow a new oyster varietal. The location was brought to our attention by our buddy, Jay Bayer, of Saison in RVA. Jay’s friend Susan inherited a strategically situated marina in Mathews County that had fallen out of use after her father passed. The property is located on a creek off Mobjack Bay near the New Point Comfort Lighthouse. Given the awesome location, Jay naturally thought of oysters. We agreed and are scheduled to close in early March. As a nod to the Mobjack Bay location and our friend who brought us the opportunity, we are branding our new oyster varietal as the Mobjay oyster. Thank you Jay for everything, you’re the best!

Grown in the salty Mobjack waters, the Mobjay will be the perfect compliment to the sweetness of our Eagle Flat oysters from the York River. The Mobjay grounds are already teaming with wild oysters…and that is the sign of a healthy growing location. But before we can bring you these new, sustainably raised cocktail oysters, we have to get the necessary federal, state, and local approvals. And that is a multiple-year process at worst and a one year process at best. But the wait will be well worth it; nothing worth doing is easy.

As far as brewery and raw bar dreams go, they haven’t died. No way. No how. As we go Back to the New Farm, we are working on a revised plan. But like the Phoenix rising from the ashes, it will look a little different, and be even stronger than its prior version. Onwards and Upwards!

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