Cold puts East Coast mussel and oyster supply on ice

If you think the wind chill is harsh when you step outside your door, imagine what it feels like out on the icy sea.

Shellfishing is the latest industry to be disrupted by the unprecedented chill across the Eastern Seaboard this winter. While the freeze is not good news for fishermen or seafood sellers, it also puts restaurateurs under the gun.

Mussel harvesting off the shores of Prince Edward Island, source of 80 percent of cultured mussels in North America, has come to a near complete halt in the last week; some boats are trapped in the ice. Only two or three of the 40 or 50 Jersey Shore boats that usually go out for oysters, scallops and lobsters are venturing into the ocean right now.

Monk's Cafe considered temporarily pulling its famed bowls of Belgian mussels from the menu. Mitch Prensky at Supper has implemented a provisional moratorium on oysters during happy hour at his South Street dining room. At Oyster House, chef Brett Naylor is doing his best to keep the namesake oysters flowing, but selection is extremely limited and he's taking a hit on costs.

Wholesale oyster prices are up 50 to 75 percent, according to Bret Hesh, manager at Bensalem's Hesh Seafood, and that's when he can manage to get his hands on them.

"There's nothing coming out of New England at all, so everyone's scrambling to get oysters from down South. It's driving the price up, and sometimes they're just not available," he said, noting that the current crunch is the worst he's seen in his 16 years running the family business.

"[The scarcity] has never been so widespread and lasted so long," said Samuel & Sons Seafood vice president Joe Lasprogata. Usually, the Philadelphia wholesaler offers more than 65 varieties of East Coast oysters, but on Feb. 27, only 14 of them were available. Fresh clams are also hard to come by.

The fresh mussel supply is facing an even bigger paucity. In aquaculture, mussels are grown attached to ropes that dangle below the surface. The bivalves thrive in cold water, so they're still very much alive; it's harvesting that's the problem. If a boat captain actually decided to venture through choppy ice to pull the crop, the mussels would freeze within a minute of contact with the sub-zero air, killing them (which renders them culinarily useless).

At Hesh, that means sales of mussels have slid from a weekly average of 6,000 to 7,000 pounds to zero.

At Monk's, the kitchen usually goes through more than 2,000 pounds of mussels each week on its own, which is why proprietors considered pulling them from the menu during this crisis. In the end, they decided to pay more than double for mussels shipped across country from Canada and Mexico, so that patrons seeking to pair the bar's Belgian beers with traditional moules frites would not be disappointed.

At Oyster House, Naylor is also concerned about customers' perception. Instead of raising prices, he's just accepting a (temporary) loss of profit. But the chef does see a silver lining to the shortage: when guests notice the lack of variety at the raw bar, it opens up a dialogue.

"It makes our guests understand where our food comes from and how precious it is," he said. "And it makes me appreciate the summer."