Warning! Reading this article may lead to a drastic shift in your dinner plans.
OK, you’ve been warned…

Folks on the Outer Banks can’t get enough oysters lately. They’re eating oysters in huge numbers. They’re learning about oysters. They’re even recycling oysters. Oysters have been the talk of the town this fall thanks to a new reef constructed from oyster shells in the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s Restaurant to Reef program. The two-acre reef in Wysocking Bay in Hyde County – just off Highway 264 past Engelhard – is made up of 1,200 bushels of recycled shells.

As Leslie Vegas puts it, that’s a LOT of delicious dinners, and a LOT of volunteer hours.
“It gets people more connected to their food and sort of causes some excitement about the fact that they’re part of this bigger cycle,” says Vegas, who serves as a Coastal Specialist for the NCCF. “It gets people emotionally invested in their food and where it comes from. And for the Outer Banks with seafood and oysters, if there are any ‘nature nerds’ out there, it’s exciting that that can still happen.”

From Left: Leslie Vegas, Barbara and Andy DelVillar (volunteers), Greg Allen (DMF staff).

The NC Division of Marine Fisheries got an oyster shell recycling program going from 2013 to 2018, but cuts in funding killed it. In stepped the Coastal Federation, a well-known member-supported non-profit focused on protecting the natural habitats of the North Carolina coast. The Coastal Federation launched Restaurant to Reef as a pilot program in 2018 and started collecting shells from restaurants all over the Outer Banks, with the biggest contributions coming from Awful Arthur’s Oyster Bar in Kitty Hawk and Blue Water Grill & Raw Bar at the Pirate’s Cove Marina in Manteo. Wysocking Bay was chosen as the location for the reef after Vegas and the NCCF consulted with local watermen and fishermen.

“It’s important that people understand that it’s not just, like, dumping shells haphazardly. It’s a thought-out process to figure out where a new habitat would be the most beneficial,” Vegas explains. “Where oyster populations have historically been lower, an environment that might have poor water quality that oysters could help clean up – and for this particular oyster reef, we wanted to make sure that it would be in a harvestable area, a place where people could eventually go out and harvest oysters from the street, so it had to be an open area.”

Bill Trimyer unloading recycled oysters.

The Division of Marine Fisheries was working on another nearby project and agreed to offload the shells from its barge – “because they’re very nice,” Vegas says – as she and other NCCF officials enjoyed watching the process unfold from their own boat. The recycled reef now can attract oyster spat – and other marine life, of course – looking for a new place to grow and the cycle continues. Vegas says the NCCF already is looking at new sites for the next Restaurant to Reef project, hoping to find something locally around Roanoke Island. These kinds of details prove fascinating to many of the diners who enjoy special lectures during October’s “Oyster Shellabration” week, for instance.

“We’ve had people from states like Ohio and Pennsylvania who came for some of our educational sessions and it was totally foreign to them, but it really made them think about their food and how much work goes into what they’re eating,” Vegas says. “They’re excited about it, the volunteers are excited about it, the chefs are excited about it.”

One of the biggest ambassadors from the kitchen is Evan Hayes, the executive chef at Blue Water. Before coming to Blue Water six years ago, Hayes might have enjoyed sitting around a burn barrel in the winter, shucking oysters with friends from time to time, but now oysters are a huge part of his life. He takes part in talks about oysters during events such as Taste of the Beach or the North Carolina Oyster Trail. He strives to buy locally farmed oysters to support local watermen. And golly does he schlep shells by the bucketload every night.

“I know we are a big contributor because I lug the shells out to the parking lot every day,” Hayes says with a laugh, estimating the Blue Water haul to be in the “tens of tons” each year. “Any given weekend day, we’ll have 30 gallons of oyster shells at the end of the day. It’s gone up exponentially the last two years with the amount of oysters we’re selling.”

He hasn’t had downtime yet to visit Wysocking Bay to check out the new reef, but is proud that his restaurant helped build it. Recycling oyster shells is a necessity, after all, since it’s actually illegal to send them to the landfill.

“It’s a huge benefit for us. I was really relieved once we found out the program was going to start over again,” Hayes says. “It’s really important for us to recycle these shells and create a substrate for the next generation to live on. Oysters don’t just grow on anything. If there’s not that substrate to live on, eventually they just die. It’s really good that we are putting that back into the waters around here. It is a really fragile ecosystem.”

Supporting that ecosystem is why Hayes doesn’t mind hauling those buckets of smelly shells to place next to the dumpster. And it’s why John Thomas doesn’t mind poking around the dumpsters of local restaurants to collect the shells. There’s nothing glamorous about their work, but Vegas’ “go-to volunteers” – Thomas, Bill Trimyer and Paul Kutsko – are what makes the Restaurant to Reef program so successful, she says.

Thomas is passionate about the environment and has volunteered with the Coastal Federation for about eight years, hauling shells from the annual oyster celebration in Hatteras to Corolla and all points in between. He downplays his contribution, explaining it away as about four hours of work every other Monday when he makes his rounds. Rather than getting his pickup truck smelly, Thomas hauls the buckets on a utility trailer. On average, he’ll take 15 to 20 5-gallon buckets of shells from Blue Water and a couple of buckets from Sugar Shack each week.

“It’s not difficult. A little weight, a little smelly,” Thomas says. “You know you’re helping somebody, and plus it gets me out of the house.” Thomas has had people stop him at the dumpsters and ask if they can have the buckets he’s swapping out, or if they can take the oyster shells and use them for things like lining their driveway. “You have to sort of explain it to people,” he says. “ ‘They’ve found a lot better use for them, helping the ecology. It’s actually against the law for you to take these oyster shells.’ ” Thomas takes the shells to Manns Harbor and washes them before storing them at a location the Marine Fisheries Division lets NCCF use. Locals also can deliver shells to the Kill Devil Hills Recycle Center, which has a special collection spot.

And while Vegas is happy to take contributions from enthusiastic folks who perhaps had a big oyster roast to celebrate a special occasion, the Wanchese site isn’t technically open for drop-offs, and the KDH center is quite particular about making sure people are careful with what they drop off. Especially at the Wanchese site, she encourages people to contact the NCCF first by calling 252.473.1607.

“We’re always happy to help coordinate drop-offs,” Vegas says. “We really don’t want anything commingled with the shells because that’ll just mess up the integrity of the reef and we won’t be able to use them.”

If this current spate of enthusiasm about oysters keeps up, the spat might find a new reef to call home even sooner than the two years it took for Wysocking Bay to be finished. Clearly, it’s up to all of us to do our part to help replenish the reefs. What’s for dinner again?

“Oh, yeah, I love oysters,” Vegas says with a laugh. “I haven’t eaten as many oysters in my entire life as I have since I started working for Coastal Fed, and I am not complaining about that at all.”