May 16, 2023 — On a recent spring evening at Crave Fishbar in New York City, the oysters resting on beds of ice hailed from Long Island, Virginia, Washington, Cape Cod, and British Columbia. But once they’d been slurped, all of their shells went to a single place: New York Harbor.
As a participant in the Billion Oyster Project, Crave Fishbar is in its eighth year of collecting shells to help restore the oyster reefs in New York Harbor. The restaurant’s servers, who include many aspiring actors, tell the origin stories of the daily array of oyster options—the better the story, the greater the popularity of that brand, said Jeremy Benson, general manager of the Upper West Side location.
But the best story the team tells is that of the Billion Oyster Project, a nonprofit founded in 2014 that has organized 15,000 volunteers and 60 restaurants to restore oysters at 15 reef sites across New York’s five boroughs.
The effort seeks to bring back the harbor’s oyster population—which was destroyed by overharvesting and pollution in less than 100 years—by collecting used shells, installing them in critical locations, and “seeding” baby oysters on top to form reefs.
In addition to donating shells, Crave Fishbar employees have learned about the bivalve’s ability to clean the water and make shorelines more resilient to climate change. Every year, they join other volunteers who remove plastic forks from shell piles, clean cured shell, and load cages destined for the harbor, a body of water that The New York Times has described as “once an open sewer.”