On The Clock with Malindi Taylor of Fanny Bay Oysters

The sun is cresting over the Howe Sound at Horseshoe Bay as the first ferry of the day rolls in. It’s just shy of 6 a.m. and we’re in a 2005 red Hyundai Tucson in the sloping lineup for the ferry toward Nanaimo’s Departure Bay, full of soon-to-be vacationers and daily commuters.

Where we’re going—Fanny Bay—in the Comox Valley where Fanny Bay Oysters has its operation (and several oyster farm leases, including one that lies just ahead of Kim Catrall’s island home) is “so remote, there are definitely more oysters than people,” Malindi Taylor, sales and marketing coordinator at michelin-recommended Fanny Bay Oyster Bar (and fifth generation oyster farmer from the Taylor Shellfish Company family—the parent company of the restaurant), tells me.

In the front seat is Chef Alex Guido, the restaurant’s head chef, who is also coming along for the ride. It’s his first time visiting the farm’s operations since he was hired at the company over a year ago.

The “more oysters than people” paradigm certainly rings true as we pull up on a beach at the southern tip of Vancouver Island in the Tucson—a little SUV that a now-33-year-old Taylor has had since she turned 16—where beds upon beds of oysters and manila clams are exposed in this early morning low-tide. Some of them are hiding under predator nets: nets that protect the farm from hungry seagulls and crabs that crack open the vulnerable young oysters.

We walk the beach toward the waterline, and Taylor stops to pull a blue paring knife out of her pocket, deftly cracking open a large oyster, severing the hinge of the bivalve mollusk and exposing the meat. She tells me and Chef Alex about an event in Australia she once attended where they washed the freshly shucked oysters in tap water before consuming—much to her dismay.

“If you rinse out the oyster liquor, you lose a lot of flavour,” she tells us, pointing out the flesh and watery bed inside the shell. “If you think about it, the liquor is the very last gulp of sea water that they get.”

My mouth watering (and agape), Taylor sets the shell back down on the rocks gently for a bird or another scavenger to dine on.

She pulls up an oyster spat—which is when wild oysters group and reef together, attaching themselves to rocks, driftwood and each other. 

“They find something to attach to, which is why you’ll find them attached to logs and rocks a lot of the time,” Taylor says. She also points out a smattering of purple-shelled Savary oysters, which are foreign and invasive (even though they bear the name of a nearby local island).

As the tide ever so slowly comes back in, we walk back toward the red SUV and through fields of sea asparagus baking in the sun. Chef Alex pulls up a sprig, then another, and pops it into his mouth. I follow suit as the crunchy, salty sea herb pops between my teeth and onto my tongue.

“I could just sit here all day with a beer,” he says, looking out toward the sea, munching on sea asparagus. I have to agree that would be a pretty fine day.

But we’re on our way to the big operations to see how these oysters get purged—you can’t just slurp them up on the beach, despite my wishes.

At the facility, the massive haul of oysters are placed in tanks with clean, circulating seawater, expelling any possible vibrio bacteria (hello, red tides!) from their digestive system into the surrounding water, effectively cleaning themselves, for several days. 

For each lot of oysters harvested, five pieces of oysters from that harvest lot are sent for testing, and if even one oyster is over 100 ppm (a measurement of the Vibrio bacteria quantified in “parts per million”), the whole lot will have to be purged again until all the samples come back at an acceptable level—so now it makes sense that I’ve never been sick from eating raw oysters at a restaurant. And trust me, I can put away quite a few.

Here, no part of the oyster is wasted, so Fanny Bay repurposes discarded shells by crushing them up and using them for different purposes, like making chicken feed or making “chips” for landscaping and sustainable cement mixtures. 

Taylor explains that small bits of the shells also get thrown into the oysters’ sea harvesting “wild bags” so that the oysters don’t attach to each other in spats, as we saw earlier.

Between all of the tours and explanations, Taylor is taking several calls; stepping out, then stepping back in.

“Tuesday is a big shipping and receiving day,” she says, almost apologetically, noting that she’s handling incoming and outgoing parcels of fresh oysters to restaurants that the shellfish giant supplies to, including Sashimiya, Nero Tondo, Meo and Sainam (and that’s not even mentioning seafood stalwarts in the city like Boulevard, Rodney’s and Harbour).

While sales and marketing coordinator may be her title at Fanny Bay, it’s clear Taylor works as the operations manager; handling processing, shipping and receiving; collaborating with chefs on menu items; developing and running the website and, well, taking very lucky media folks on tours of their farms and facilities. 

“I don’t really care what my title is. I’m more like, whatever you need me to do, I’m here to do it,” she says, clearly not resting on the laurels she’s inherited as part of the five-generations-strong seafood mogul family.

“That’s how my dad and my grandpa ran the company, too. Our big thing is always: get together over the table, eat some food together, talk about what’s going on and you’ll be able to help each other out. It always has to be collaborative, especially when you’ve got so much going on.”

The depth of her job is dizzying, but she’s got her sea legs in more ways than one—and it’s clear, it’s in her blood.

Deftly, she moves back into action taking us to the shucking facility, where those big, meaty, wild looking oysters are getting shucked in record time, the meat being rinsed—in sea water, of course—and packaged in tubs to take to grocery stores.

I ask if they ever find a pearl in here, and they do, but it’s rare.

Later, Taylor is shucking another handful of oysters, this time at the company’s seafood stall near the Buckley Bay ferry crossing toward Denman Island. Here, folks often sit to grab lunch fare and have it on the little green picnic tables as they wait for the 200-person capacity boat. 

On this day, the sun is hot, and Taylor has hand-picked a feast for Chef Alex and me, including the tequila-candied salmon, fresh poke and fish pies. Chef Alex begins to ideate new creations as we dig in, and the conversation highlights the collaborative relationship between the two of them.

“I’m not a chef,” Taylor offers. “I love food but at the end of the day, I don’t possess that skill so working with someone as talented as him. You get to see your product all the way from the hatchery, the farm, harvest, processing. Alex turns it into this gorgeous plate of food.”

We’re back on the mainland 12 hours later; it’s nearly 6 p.m. when we dock back in Horseshoe Bay.

On the way back to the restaurant, Chef Alex and Taylor discuss which cuts of salmon they should get from Jenice (that’s Jenice Yu, founder and CEO of eatFISH, a sustainable seafood supplier that works with high-end restaurants such as Maenam, Ask for Luigi and Hawksworth) and what tonight’s feature should be.

Chef Alex settles on a sockeye salmon with sea asparagus—perhaps inspired by the morning’s harvest—in a beurre blanc.