As restaurant reviewer for New Orleans’ big daily paper, Brett Anderson already had one life-changing story to cover in 2005, as Hurricane Katrina shattered this famed food city. 2010 brought fresh tragedy: the BP oil spill’s devastating impact on Gulf fisheries.
In mid-September, Al Sunseri sat two raw oysters on a table next to the coffeemaker in the offices of P&J Oyster Company. The specimens were not up to his standards, but P&J, which Sunseri runs with his brother Sal, was selling them anyway. The company had no other choice.
“You see?” Sunseri said after feeding the oysters to a visitor. “They got a good oyster flavor. They just don’t have any salt. And they’re small.”
Sunseri blames these deficiencies on the fresh Mississippi River water diverted to protect Louisiana’s delicate coastal marshlands from the oil that poured into the Gulf of Mexico from the ruptured BP oil well for most of the summer. Still, “they’re decent oysters,” he said. “People want to buy them.”
P&J has dealt in oysters, both as a distributor and processor, for nearly 135 years, making it the oldest oyster processor and distributor in the United States. The disaster triggered by the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion on April 20 brought that tradition to a virtual standstill. On June 10, the Sunseris, having conceded their regular suppliers could no longer provide them with the volume and quality of oysters necessary to operate their business, ceased regular operations at P&J. They laid off 13 full-time employees.
“The bottom line is that our guys that we purchase from are not working,” Sal Sunseri said on the day of the shutdown.
The freshwater diversions, mass commercial fishing closures and redeployment of fishers to aid in the clean-up effort proved, at least in the short term, to be as damaging to the Louisiana seafood industry as the spill itself. But no sector of the industry has felt the pain more acutely than oyster fishers and purveyors, whose fragile resource has been damaged by fresh water, partly from the diversions, and will take years to rebound.
Louisiana is currently producing oysters at about a third of its pre-spill rate. According to Mike Voisin, a member of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force and the owner of Motivatit Seafoods in Houma, the dockside prices for oysters are 50 percent higher than before the oil spill.
And the news didn’t get any better on Thursday, when the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Commission announced that public seed grounds east of the Mississippi River and in Hackberry Bay would remain closed. According to Wildlife and Fisheries, the grounds east of the Mississippi account for roughly 28 percent of the annual Louisiana oyster harvest. They were scheduled to open Nov. 15.
Before the oil spill, Al Sunseri said, P&J would process 30,000 to 35,000 shucked oysters a day, along with another 20,000 to 30,000 half-shell oysters to sell to local oyster bars. Today, with the shucking operation still on ice, the staff reduced to two full-time employees—Al and Sal—and the distribution business cut to an eighth of what it was, P&J’s headquarters, which is spread over two buildings straddling Toulouse Street in the French Quarter, appear from the outside to be well-kept properties in need of a buyer.
But the June 10 operations stoppage forced the initiation of a new business model at P&J, which remains in place today. The Sunseris call it “improvising,” with the ultimate goal being to keep P&J in a position to one day resume business as usual.
“There are still a lot of unknowns in terms of how our business is going to be two, three, five years from now,” Sunseri said as he settled into a leather couch separating two facing desks in an office just off P&J’s idled shucking facility. “Are the oysters going to spawn and set like they always did? Are we going to have the same supply of oysters? Are some people just going to get out of (the oyster business) and not deal with this anymore?”
By “this” Sunseri was referring to waking up at an ungodly hour—he gets to work an hour or so before his brother Sal, who usually arrives at 5 a.m.—without ever knowing what the day will bring.
The manual labor of receiving, storing and delivering heavy sacks and boxes of shell oysters is often part of the early morning agenda, but with the Gulf oyster supply depleted and many fishers still wary of investing the money to harvest what’s there, the Sunseris can never be sure how much product, if any, they’ll have to sell to their customers.
“My fear is that the courage it takes to stay in business and be in business is really being tested in them,” Voisin said of the Sunseris. “New Orleans wouldn’t be New Orleans without them.”
The Sunseris’ predicament requires them to carefully ration their limited oyster supply among their existing restaurant customers, many of whom display the P&J brand on their menus. There is pride in serving oysters from a historic local company with a longstanding reputation for quality. The Sunseris are fiercely protective of P&J’s brand recognition, making it particularly painful to turn away the eager buyers who rattle their cell phones all day, every day.
“We don’t have any shucked oysters from Louisiana right now,” Sunseri explained to one such potential customer on the phone. “The shell oysters we do have are not big. Do you buy oysters often? Who is this?”
Sunseri adjusted his position on the couch and continued: “Well, you know, Ryan, if you bought oysters in recent months, you’d know that the oysters are really small because they’ve been pulled out of the water early because of the concern of having a fresh water die-off. And that’s the reason there’s no salt in them. But I don’t have them every day, Ryan, and I’m really just taking care of my regular customers right now.”
The “P” stands for John Popich, a Croatian fisherman who arrived in New Orleans in the 1850s and began farming and distributing oysters in 1876. The “J” is Joseph Jurisich, the orphaned son of the owners of a French Quarter oyster bar who Popich brought on as his partner.
The founders planted the seed that Alfred Sunseri, who was married to Jurisich’s cousin, helped nurture to bloom after he was hired around 1921, when the company purchased its current base of operations. Alfred became a full partner and, in 1952, hired his only son Sal as an accountant. Over the years, Sal, who rose to the level of president and general manager, gradually acquired stock from his partners. By the late ’70s, he had made his own signature contribution to P&J’s history: delivering full ownership to the Sunseri family.
Sal Sunseri’s sons Al, who at 52 is a 31-year veteran of P&J, and Sal, who turns 50 this month and started in 1984, increasingly worry that their legacy could be having presided over a company the fifth generation would be wise to let go.
“We’ve been through the Great Depression and all that stuff, but nothing like this,” said Sal Sunseri, whose voice, like his brother’s, approximates what would happen if a Boston accent traveled through the pipes of a slide trombone. “Being able to be one of the components that make New Orleans such a great destination for food is an honor. I do want my son (Dominic, age 12) to have the opportunity to continue in this business. But I also think there could be an easier life for him.”
It was mid-October, and Sal Sunseri, dressed as if he was on his way to play golf at City Park, was in the back office helping the accountant Nolan Haro make sense of P&J’s finances. (The Sunseris’ sister Merri Sunseri Schneider used to do P&J’s books, but she retired in May.) Al Sunseri was standing near the garage door that opens up to the empty shucking room, giving yet another spill-related interview to out-of-town media, this one a collection of television journalists from Japan.
“The marketplace is very different,” Sunseri said into the camera. “And the people we’re competing against aren’t oyster suppliers. They’re fish mongers.”
The distinction between oyster and seafood dealers is one the Sunseris have emphasized frequently, often without prompting, in the months since the oil spill. The lack of diversification that made P&J particularly vulnerable when the disaster spun out of control went beyond its reliance on a single seafood species. Their business is based not just on processing and selling oysters but also on processing and selling Louisiana oysters. The oil disaster created an opportunity for new players to enter the local oyster market, and the Sunseris are not amused at the prospect of facing competition from suppliers whose fidelity isn’t nearly so pure.
“Oysters in general are usually used as lead items for seafood distributors,” said Al Sunseri, who estimates P&J is able to serve only one third of its customers because of the oil spill. “They’re widgets to them. They make their money cutting fish.” Sunseri, who had just finished shucking oysters for the cameras, was wearing a mud-stained rubber glove. “We’re a specialty company,” he said. “We only sell one product. We specialize in it. It’s a premium, high-quality product.”
“I’ve got companies I’ve never heard of calling me saying they’ve got oysters,” said C.J. Gerdes, owner of Casamento’s, the legendary Uptown oyster house. Gerdes still relies on P&J for 80 percent of his oysters because “I pretty well know what quality I’m getting from them. It’s always going to be good.”
“In the last couple of months we’ve gone to other sources,” said Darin Nesbit, executive chef of the Bourbon House, which, like all of the restaurants owned by the restaurateur Dickie Brennan, normally relies exclusively on P&J. “They supply us with the best oysters around.”
In mid-October, P&J received a shipment of 336 boxes of oysters from Grand Bayou du Large in Terrebonne Parish, just below Caillou Lake. While the load represented a fraction of what P&J would process on a typical day before the oil spill, it created an air of optimism that has become rare inside the company’s headquarters.
“October has been very, very scarce, so that’s a very nice influx,” Sal Sunseri said. In the span of 30 minutes, two customers wandered into the office to inquire about the availability of oysters. One had to be turned away.
“Maybe I’ll come back Friday,” he said.
The Sunseris were pleased with the quality of the Bayou du Large oysters, but they did not come from one of their regular suppliers. Under normal circumstances, the great majority of P&J’s oysters come out of the Barataria Basin, west of the Mississippi River. In the Sunseris’ opinion, these particular waters are to Louisiana oysters what the soil found in certain parts of California’s Napa Valley are to cabernet sauvignon.
“I’m not bragging, but I know where good oysters grow,” Al Sunseri said. “It all depends on the water, the mixture of fresh and salt, and you don’t find better conditions for oysters than in Barataria.”
The oil spill shut P&J off from Barataria oysters as well as the few other areas where the company had long-standing relationships with suppliers, forcing the Sunseris to scramble for oysters worthy of their brand. The Nov. 1 opening of the public oyster grounds in Texas brought new opportunities for the Sunseris to meet customer demand, but not without some difficulty.
“Years ago, we used to get quite a few oysters from Texas,” Al Sunseri said, “but our customers told us they wanted Louisiana oysters, so we stopped. We kind of shot ourselves in the foot.”
If things appeared to be looking up in late October, when P&J received a shipment of Barataria oysters from Pete Vujnovich, it was only in relation to how bad things have been. Before the spill, Vujnovich, who is based in Port Sulphur, supplied P&J with between a third to a quarter of its oysters, and he hadn’t been fishing since May 22.
On his first trip back dredging since the disaster, Vujnovich harvested 180 mini-sacks of oysters, all of which he sold to P&J. The yield was less than half of what he said he would normally find this time of year.
“There’s a very limited resource out there,” Vujnovich said. “Seventy percent of my leases fell under the footprint of the oil.”
“I’m happy that I got what I got,” Al Sunseri said of Vujnovich’s catch. “We got some nice oysters. I just don’t know when I’m going to be able to get them again.”