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By TIANA KENNELL
Asheville Citizen Times
ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) -- One guest's dinner may be another guest's treasure at a seafood restaurant.
Chefs and line cooks are known to unearth unexpected items within shipments that are more than what they bargained for from natural pearls to mysterious oceanic creatures.
The Lobster Trap line cook Brandt Crabbe estimates he shucks about 75,000-100,000 oysters a year, and in seven years of shucking, he has found nearly 15 pearls hidden inside ranging in shape and usually less than a centimeter in size.
Crabbe's collection features some larger-than-usual pearls. Although he hasn't had the pearls appraised, he still gets excited about finding one.
"I figure those are pretty imperfect so they're probably not worth very much but maybe I'm totally wrong," said Crabbe, who has nearly a decade in the industry. "I've probably shucked about 800,000 oysters by now, and I've worked at another place where I shucked oysters, too."
Oyster House Brewing Company, on average, shucks nearly 150 dozen of oysters a week and a couple of pearls may be found per box of 100 oysters, owner Billy Klingel said. Spotting a pearl can be as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack or more like a sewing pin.
"It's like the size of one of those round balls at the end of a sewing pin so it may go unnoticed until it ends up in your mouth and your teeth clamp down on it," Klingel said.
"The biggest one I've ever pulled out of an edible oyster was maybe a little bit bigger than a BB (ball bearing) but most of them are really, really small just like a tiny, little pea gravel and you just know it's a pearl because it wants to chip your teeth as you're biting it," he said.
Jettie Rae's Oyster House serves cultivated, farmed, cold water East Coast oysters primarily from New England and Canada, which have the occasional pearl found inside.
"They usually get found by the shuckers because we take really good care and make sure to present a really clean and shell-free oyster, so they don't usually make it to the table," executive chef Will Cisa said.
The restaurant has served more than 107,590 oysters on the half shell and is aiming for 135,00 oysters by the end of the year, according to Cisa.
Quality is important, as are speed and precision, when working in a busy restaurant, he said. And the fastest in-house time recorded for shucking a pristine volume of oysters is held by head shucker Mads Ludvigsen, who shucked 400 oysters in an hour and a half.
Still, one can easily be missed because of its small size, and guests have different reactions to finding a pearl on their plate.
"It's a gamble on whether they get upset or not. I get it -- you don't want to eat a pearl. Some guests get excited, "Yeah, I got a pearl!'" Mike McCarty, owner of The Lobster Trap, said.
Pearl production, value and collections
Explaining the pearl production process can get technical but it boils down to it being the result of the oyster protecting itself from an irritant, which eventually creates a pearl.
"The pearl is just a foreign object, like a splinter, that gets into the oyster, and the mantle will develop a nacre. The open oyster is irritated, and it will form a pearl that way," McCarty said.
Pearls may be found in mussels and clams but it's unusual, he said.
"You see a little bubble and you push at it and a little pearl pops out the side, but most of the time it's just a bubble," Crabbe said.
The pearls found at restaurants aren't the same as what's sold in a jewelry store, which is cultivated and can take years to grow, Cisa said.
"That's a different species of oyster that they grow, and we don't really consume those for food. Those are grown to cultivate oysters," Klingel said. "It's just a piece of sand, essentially, that starts out and gets in there. It keeps getting tossed around and it rounds it out, and it'll grow."
But, the value of a natural pearl is more sentimental than monetary.
"Those pearls are worth something but they're not as valuable as a saltwater pearl that forms," McCarty said.
An Oyster House line cook found a pearl that was the largest they're seen at the restaurant almost the size of a dime and now has it in a jar at home, Klingel said.