Tomales Bay Oyster Company
Live Pacific oysters straight off the farm at Marshall, sold unshucked, since 1909.1
Why go
The oyster you eat everywhere else on this coast started in this bay. The farm's own history dates it: In 1928 the California Department of Fish and Game partners with TBOC to introduce the Pacific oyster from Japan to Tomales Bay. After several years of trial and error, TBOC produces an exceptional oyster that grows in popularity to become the West Coast standard.
1 Several years of trial and error is the part to notice. Before that the local Olympia was too small and too coppery for the Gold Rush appetite, and San Francisco Bay had been planted with Atlantic seed shipped in on the transcontinental railway until pollution killed the beds off.1 Tomales Bay got the industry because the water was clean and the railway ran to it. One detail from the middle years is worth carrying: Oscar Johannson, who worked here from 1926, kept a seven-mile fence in the bay to hold the bat rays off the beds.1
Order this / avoid
- Order: oysters by the dozen or the sack, live and unshucked, and take a knife and a glove.1
- Avoid: arriving set up for lunch. The farm states it plainly,
There is no picnicking here at the farm,
and hands out a map of West Marin parks instead.2
Good to know
- Hours: Monday to Thursday 9am to 4pm, Friday to Sunday 9am to 5pm. Closed Thanksgiving and Christmas.2
- The farm calls itself "California's oldest continuously run shellfish farm." That is its own claim, made on its own history page.1
Verdict
should-visit — The evidence is one document and the farm wrote it, which caps how high this can sit until somebody independent confirms the 1909 claim. What holds it up is that the interesting part is checkable in the water rather than in the copy: a state trial in 1928 put the Japanese Pacific oyster into this bay, and it is what the whole coast grows now. Go for the shellfish and the drive, and know before you set off that you cannot eat them there.