![]() Johns County, the 6,500 square foot restaurant will include a rooftop seating area. Owned by husband and wife duo Mike and Brittany Cooney, who also own Ember & Iron in St. Gemma Fish + Oyster is a new fresh seafood concept that will open at the new Shoppes at East San Marco shopping center in San Marco. In the meantime, recognizing the popularity of this longtime culinary staple of the First Coast, here’s a look at three oyster bar concepts that have recently opened or intend to open near Downtown in San Marco and the Southbank. Hopefully, this interest from fishermen and shellfish-hungry consumers alike will lead to action from the state and bring back a delicacy coveted by First Coast residents for millennia. Additionally, Jacksonville is seeing a burgeoning comeback of oyster bars. Tests of water quality have shown continued improvements in bacteria levels and shellfish are thriving throughout the area. Since 2010, local interests have lobbied the state to finally replace the water-monitoring equipment and reopen Jacksonville’s oyster beds. However, continued closures of beds, including the shuttering of Apalachicola Bay for oystering in 2020, have made Florida oysters hard to come by in a state where they were once plentiful.įisherman Mike Hilchey collecting oysters on Simpson Creek in Jacksonville in 1985. ![]() Augustine, which by 2016 was Florida’s second-largest oyster harvesting region after Apalachicola Bay. The state never replaced the equipment, so the beds have remained closed. In 1994, a barge broke free of its mooring and collided into Jacksonville’s last remaining oyster beds, damaging equipment used to monitor levels of dangerous bacteria in the water. Some harvesting remained around Fort George Island and the Talbot Islands in Jacksonville and the St. Oystering declined in Jacksonville and other parts of Florida in the late 20th century due to rising pollution and development pressures that disrupted oyster beds. ![]() His company was so successful that Anderson cofounded the Anderson Tucker & Company bank in 1914 to encourage growth of more Black-owned business. Anderson, an Eastside native, began by selling oysters and fish on a street corner in 1902 and grew into a large supplier of fresh local seafood. One local company that made oyster harvesting a big business was the Anderson Fish & Oyster Company. Though dwarfed by the output of Apalachicola Bay in the Florida Panhandle, oystering was a significant industry in the Jacksonville and St. Anderson, founder of Jacksonville’s Anderson Fish and Oyster Company. In the 19th and 20th centuries, oysters were a cheap, prolific and comparatively easy-to-harvest food source, and oyster houses and seafood shacks could be found all across the waterfront and throughout the city’s neighborhoods. Johns River mouth and nearby waterways made heavy use of the mollusks, as the vast shell middens they built up with discarded shells attest. The slimy filter-feeders have always played a key role in our ecosystem, with each one able to cleanse 50 gallons of water a day of impurities, and for thousands of years they were an abundant food staple for those living in the region. Oysters are everywhere in Jacksonville and the First Coast. Oysters were a staple of the diet of the Mocama Timucua who lived on the St.
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