Gulf Shores is a city on Alabama's Gulf Coast. Its Gulf State Park has beaches, trails and a pier, plus a golf course and a zip line over the dunes. To the west, sea turtles and migratory birds thrive among the coastal habitats of Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge. Farther west, 19th-century Fort Morgan guards Mobile Bay. The Alabama Gulf Coast Zoo offers hands-on encounters with lemurs, kangaroos and sloths.
"Hannah Kaplan founded Barrier Beauties, an oyster farm off the Gulf shore in Galveston, now providing Beatrice with fresh stock. Her company is the second to register as an oyster farm in Texas and, so far, the only one founded by a woman. And it’s been a long road to get them to market because, as Kaplan points out, Texas has been a holdout among coastal states to legalizing oyster farming. Kaplan says the permitting process alone took nearly a year, and the state still needs to approve a hatchery program for spawning oysters. So all of hers go out of state for the fertilization process, only to return to the Gulf when the crop is ready to be planted. But when it is in the water, Kaplan says they harvest between half a million and up to 1.5 million oysters from a single spawn. Barrier Beauties have been available at Beatrice for a minute, primarily for use in cooked dishes like its Oysters Beatrice, a savory baked oyster with fresh greens and melted parmesan inspired by Oysters Rockefeller. But that dish uses the larger, more familiarly sized Gulf oyster. Kaplan has been working to harvest smaller oysters that she calls boutique, akin to those served raw out of Canada and from the Eastern seaboard. When they’re readily available, the restaurant plans to add them to its raw oyster program, alongside Murder Point oysters farmed in the Gulf off Alabama." - Courtney E. Smith
