The Oyster Guide

Bluepoints have been coasting on their name for nearly two centuries. The Bluepoint rage in New York City began in the early 1800s after delicious, robust wild oysters were found in the waters off the town of Blue Point on Long Island’s Great South Bay. As everywhere else, those oysters didn’t last long as New York City quickly devoured every last Bluepoint and called for more. More came. Though already in 1824 the Gazatteer of the State of New York was referring to Bluepoints in the past tense, by then a twenty-three-mile-long überbed of oysters had been found in the Great South Bay, baymen were multiplying like fleas, and any oyster from the Great South Bay was being sold as a Bluepoint. Today, you will see Bluepoints on every oyster menu in Manhattan, and quite a few elsewhere, because many people believe they want Bluepoints and nothing but. The oysters themselves are seeded on the bottom of Long Island Sound, both the Oyster Bay area of Long Island and the Norwalk area of Connecticut, dredged up a few years later, and have an extremely mild taste. You can do better.

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