When Bruce Wood’s father was dying 30 years ago, he told his son: “You’re the smart one. I want you to do something about cleaning up this bay.” Two decades later, Wood began to fulfill the promise of restoring the Chesapeake’s waters. His mode of choice: oysters.
Details: oysters and salinity.
Wood uses discarded shells to create an ecosystem in which oysters can grow and thrive, a small-scale version of the Oyster Recovery Partnership in Maryland. But what started as a way to help clean the bay — one oyster filters 50 gallons of water a day — has become a business. Nine years after he seeded his first 500 larvae, Wood sells thousands of oysters under the Dragon Creek name every week to 16 Washington-area restaurants.
His biggest client by far is Jamie Leeds, chef-owner of Hank’s Oyster Bar in Dupont Circle and Alexandria, for whom Wood last year started growing a signature oyster. During deliveries to Hank’s and other restaurants, he picks up spent shells, brings them back home and unloads them onto his one-acre reef.
On a mid-September morning hinting of fall, Leeds and three staff members decided to make the shell delivery themselves, so they loaded buckets of them (plus a few bottles of Sancerre) into the back of her SUV and set out for Wood’s Montross home on Virginia’s Northern Neck. I tagged along for the ride.
Wood farms oysters on 35 acres of leased bottom just off his back yard on the shore of Nomini Creek, a tributary of the Potomac River 15 miles west of the Chesapeake Bay. Sporting an end-of-summer tan, a powder-blue Polo shirt, wire-frame glasses and a boyish, white-blond haircut, Wood could easily have passed for Phil Donahue’s 60-year-old brother. He greeted us and seated us at a water-view lunch table piled high with steamed, just-caught crabs, crab dip, bratwurst and salads while he shucked the objects of our immediate interest: Hayden’s Reefs.
Last year, Wood built Hayden’s Reef, named after Leeds’s 8-year-old son, a few hundred feet off his dock as a breeding ground for the Hank’s oyster. Leeds introduced Hayden’s Reefs in August to promote and celebrate the expansion of her Dupont Circle location.
First, Wood explained why the spent shells are important enough for him to schlep them back to the creek.
“If you go out past where I dumped those thousands of shells, you’ll see mud,” he says. “These creeks got messed up during the colonial period, when they cut down all these trees for farms and all the silt ran into these creeks. When oysters start growing, they sink in the mud and suffocate. When you put down the shells, they have something to rest on.”
Then he served the Hayden’s Reefs. Leeds picked one up, raised it to eye level and rocked it slightly to and fro, admiring and inspecting it as if it were a gem catching the light.
“Wow,” she marveled. “These oysters are unbelievable. The cup on them is just amazing.” With that, she slurped one down and nodded. “They are all about the texture and the feel in the mouth. Creamy and meaty, with just a tiny bit of salt.”
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