A lean, green protein in the land of pork tenderloins, these bicoastal oysters feed a growing Iowa fanbase

An oyster from St. Burch Tavern, photographed Zak Neumann; illustration by Kate Doolittle

Every year on a Saturday in late March, thousands of fresh oysters arrive in chilled boxes to Club 76, the pub at the American Legion Post 1776 in North Liberty. They’re ordered for the Post’s popular Stout, Sours & Oysterfest. At the all-day festival, guests will go through between 3,500 and 5,000 oysters, eating them raw or grilled, and washing them down with rare stouts and sours. It’s the Post’s biggest fundraiser of the year.

“We take great pride in delivering this event in an affordable way,” said Post Commander Jeremy Freerks, the founder of the festival and an oyster aficionado since he was a kid. “We bring in very, very good quality oysters that arrive fresh the day before the event.”

The oysters’ arrival at the American Legion is followed by squads of volunteers, who help shuck the oysters and halve lemons in preparation for the lucky folks who’ve managed to snap up one of 225 Oysterfest tickets when they went on sale late in January.

Volunteers shuck oysters ahead of Club 76’s Stout, Sours & Oysterfest fundraiser. — courtesy of Club 76

You’ve missed your chance to get a ticket to this year’s Stouts, Sours & Oysterfest. But never fear.

Despite being over a thousand miles from either ocean, Iowa has a surprising number of restaurants that feature oysters on the menu: grilled, stacked with other shellfish in “seafood towers” and, of course, raw on the half-shell.

Restaurants in Iowa offer oysters from both coasts. Atlantic oysters hailing from cold waters are harvested off the shore of Maine or the Maritime provinces. Most Pacific oysters come from the Puget Sound area, but some arrive from Oregon or even northern California.

A raw oyster ready for its close-up at St. Burch Tavern. — Zak Neumann/Little Village

The large carbon footprint for transporting them as food is largely offset by the work that they do to clean and filter the waters where they live in large colonies, anchored to rocks. Oysters are powerful water cleaners — they use their gills to take in great quantities of water and filter out plankton and other nutrients. Farmed oysters are on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch’s “Super Green List of seafood no-brainers,” not because they don’t have brains (they don’t) but because of their sustainability and role in enhancing and sustaining waterway ecosystems.

Take that, industrial farmed meat!

Today, we think of oysters as a luxury food item; the cost of transporting them from the coasts reinforces that assumption. But oysters have also been the food of ordinary working people. Shells found in middens (ancient dumps) indicate that they were eaten by prehistoric peoples all over the world.

Garlic butter oysters sourced from the East Coast and served at Oak Park, 3901 Ingersoll Ave, Des Moines. — Jeremy Taylor/Little Village

Oysters were prized as a delicacy among ancient Greeks and Romans. Later Europeans continued to view oysters as a luxury food item, despite Jonathan Swift’s quip, “He was a bold man who first ate an oyster.”

Casanova’s 18th century claim that feasting on platefuls of oysters before sex stoked his prodigious bedroom exploits has given the oyster a reputation as an aphrodisiac. There’s not much scientific evidence behind that claim. But perhaps its performance-enhancing qualities came from the way Casanova ate them with his lovers. “We sucked them in one by one after placing them on the other’s tongue,” he wrote.

Or perhaps Casanova was inspired by the oyster’s innate sexiness: it is endowed with both male and female sex organs. To reproduce, it spawns into the ocean simultaneously with the other oysters in its reef in a huge oyster orgy.

In the mid-to-late 19th century, new harvesting techniques made oysters a cheap and easy food source in western Europe and the United States. Oysters gained in popularity through the early 20th century, and dozens of oyster recipes were included in most cookbooks from that era: fried oysters, baked oysters, oysters in curry sauce, oyster fritters and, of course, that old Christmas tradition, oyster stew.

Oysters were everywhere, and everyone could afford them, even here in Iowa. But by the mid-20th century, the oyster craze subsided. Pollution and overharvesting decimated oyster populations. The huge oyster reefs 18th century sailors had to avoid in the Chesapeake Bay are gone today.

A taste for oysters is bringing those rugged colonies of shellfish back, though. Today, oyster farming is growing in the United States. From the cold waters off the coast of eastern Canada to the warm gulf coast to the chilly Pacific northwest, oyster farmers are producing loads of water-filtering, sustainable oysters.

Oysters Rockefeller at Guesthouse Tavern + Oyster. — Jane Nesmith/Little Village

Because they’re alive when they’re shipped, oysters stay fresh for longer than you’d think — up to seven days, if they’re kept refrigerated, though most restaurants finish an order more quickly than that.

“We go through about 1,000 a week,” Derek Eidson, chef and owner of Guesthouse Tavern + Oyster in West Des Moines, told me on a recent visit. He served us oysters Rockefeller — a luxury name if I ever heard one. They’re grilled oysters topped with spinach, bacon, Mornay sauce and parmesan. Oysters Rockefeller are great for diners who aren’t quite sure they want to bite into a raw, slippery and (yes) live raw oyster.

Not everyone is squeamish about raw oysters, though. Chef Eidson says that orders are about evenly split between raw and grilled there. Most people who get grilled oysters prefer them simply prepared with butter, garlic and parmesan.

Other Iowa restaurants feature oysters differently: Mariscos El Capitan in Des Moines serves them with shrimp ceviche, and St. Burch Tavern in Iowa City presents raw oysters on the half shell with mignonette sauce or house-made cocktail sauce.

Oysters on the half-shell served at Cobble Hill. — Jane Nesmith/Little Village

At Cobble Hill in Cedar Rapids, some friends and I sampled raw oysters during social hour. Both Atlantic and Pacific oysters were available, so we tried some of each. Mignonette sauce complemented the slightly briny Atlantic oysters, while the larger, sweeter, almost cucumber-flavored Pacific oysters were good with a squeeze of lemon. Cobble Hill also offered a house-made lemon hot sauce that one of my companions found delicious.

The chef showed us the restaurant’s “Oyster Binder,” two inches thick and listing all the varieties of oysters available to the restaurant at different times: Bodega Bay Sweets or Moonrise, anyone? Along with whimsical names, each oyster’s flavor was described in terms reminiscent of wine tasting: “a complex buttery and nutty flavor with a pleasing briny finish” or “ a pleasant briny taste with a hint of sweetness in the finish.” Apparently, oysters gain a unique flavor depending on the particular part of the seafloor in which they live.

Did I notice those subtle flavor profiles? As an oyster novice, I can’t say that I did. But for an exotic, indulgent and sustainable treat, a plate of oysters just might be what you want.