By the time Josh Wilkie cuts the engine and lets the barge glide, the light has gone soft and forgiving. The Ten Thousand Islands lie ahead in layers of blue and green, each mangrove key a dark brushstroke against the shallower sheen of the Gulf. There is a scent here, salted and faintly sweet, lingering like the trace of a meal long finished.
“You’re floating over a city,” Josh says, nodding toward the low slip of indistinct islands. “It’s just been taken apart.” A former Washington Nationals pitcher and a descendant of a line of salt-stung South Carolina oystermen, Josh is now one half of Everglades Oysters, the southernmost and only tropical oyster farm in the continental United States.
Beneath Southwest Florida’s knock-kneed estuaries and modern causeways, there were once mounds—great hills of oyster and whelk and conch, ribbed with discarded bone and pottery. The Calusa built them by hand, piling the emptied shells of a staple food into looming platforms. In the 20th century, we quarried those mounds, crushing them for fill as development spread. You can drive across Florida now on the ghosts of Calusa dinners.
For a time, the oysters endured. After the Calusa came the fishermen of Everglades City and Chokoloskee, who learned to read the channels and bars with the same intuitive geometry, working reefs scattered along Southwest Florida’s coast. By the mid-20th century, however, development had reshaped the estuaries and the region’s fisheries faded. Farther north, Apalachicola Bay grew into the state’s dominant oyster ground, sustained by the Apalachicola River until drought starved it of the freshwater oysters needed to thrive. Harvesters stripped what remained, and in 2012 the bay that had supplied 90% of Florida’s oysters collapsed, eventually leading to a five-year moratorium the state began lifting in January.
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Photography by Dan Cutrona
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Josh Wilkie (left) and Fabio Galarce (right) opened Everglades Oysters on a 74-acre lease that had been dormant since 1965 in the Ten Thousand Islands. By moving the crop from the muddy shoal into a floating FlipFarm system, they aim to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of wild reefs and prove the Gulf’s native crop can still define the American plate.
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Photography by Dan Cutrona
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Photography by Dan Cutrona
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In the years between, chefs across Florida replaced local shells with crates of $5-apiece Canadian and New England oysters. As diners were gently lured toward cold-water bivalves with the promise of a safer, meatier, brinier bite, the illusion of abundance remained. But the Gulf’s native crop had largely vanished from the plate, and with it, the belief that a warm-water oyster belonged on a fine-dining menu.
Josh’s barge rides above what is left of that empire, a single question lingering: Could it ever return? In 2024, Josh and his business partner, Fabio Galarce, set out to try. A longtime central figure in the Miami nightlife scene, Fabio joins us at the rail, one hand holding a coil of rope. Two years ago, he had aspirations to build an all-Florida raw bar and found he couldn’t source a hyper-local bivalve. “Eighty to 90%—that’s how much wild oyster habitat the Gulf lost in a few decades,” he says.
To make a Southern Florida oyster possible again, not merely edible, but desired, Josh and Fabio have to rebuild the foundation and peel back decades of old fears. If the system holds—against storms, regulation and a bias for cold-water shells—this barge and the collective orbiting it could grow into what Florida has lacked since Apalachicola’s collapse: a homegrown, off‑bottom oyster infrastructure that restores some of the filtration work once done by wild reefs and redefines what a good oyster tastes like on the American plate.
Finding the site was the easier part. They needed shallow but constantly flushed water, and found it in the nutrient-rich plume between Panther Key and Cape Romano, an hour by barge from Everglades City. The farm’s two lines, strung across windy shoals, anchored by a dock, sit far enough from harbor traffic to farm without conflict and close enough to the Gulf’s movement to keep the water clean and alive. The lease had sat dormant since 1965, considered too remote for modern aquaculture and, under decades of Florida law that confined oyster farming to the bay floor, too muddy to work. Even after Florida allowed off-bottom aquaculture in 2013, the shoal remained ignored. Fabio heard talk of the site on a spearfishing trip and saw what others hadn’t.
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Courtesy Grove Bay Group/Flavia Molinari
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The duo also created a “Fresh from the Gulf” catalog, aggregating harvests from about 10 farms into a cohesive, twice-weekly offering for chefs. At Miami’s Stubborn Seed (pictured here), a switch from Canadian imports to 2.25-inch Little Honeys from Cypress Point Oyster Co. preceded the restaurant’s long-sought Michelin Green Star by weeks.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
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On Marco Island, The Oyster Society built its raw bar entirely around the collective.
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Photography by Anna Nguyen
everglade oyster revival southwest florida oyster society
Securing the right to farm was the first big hurdle. The lease, the largest aquaculture site in the Gulf, required a maze of state shellfish-harvesting rules, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permits protecting navigation and seagrass, and ongoing monitoring requirements. Then, they had to figure out how to lift the crop out of the suffocating silt. “These grounds were dead, far as anybody was concerned—bottom leases nobody worked anymore, too much mud, not enough reef left,” Josh says. “When we applied to switch from bottom to off-bottom, people looked at us like we were crazy.”
What they chose to do with the lease looks, at first glance, like blasphemy against the romantic story of the wild reef. Instead of clusters on the bay floor, their animals live in a New Zealand-designed FlipFarm, a system with hard, floating cages hung on lines like laundry. In these nurseries, hatchery seed—grain-sized juveniles newly cemented to shell bits—is tucked into mesh baskets where the Gulf’s restless tides do the work of shaping them. As they grow, the shells knock against one another, chipping away the brittle lip of new growth and forcing the oyster to turn inward, creating the prized deep cup for which northern varieties are famous. Each week, the farmers flip the lines into the sun, mimicking the drying cycle that toughens intertidal oysters in the wild and controls fouling. Minutes of exposure kill off barnacles and algae without stressing the animal. While capital‑intensive, such a system promised what the location demanded: less labor per oyster, more consistent shell shape, and a wave-driven tumble that would keep the gear from being smothered.
The winch grumbles. A line grows taut and then, with a sucking sound, the first basket lifts from the green surface, shedding threads of algae and the occasional defeated barnacle. The sound it makes landing on the deck is oddly similar to those long-ago rakes hitting a cull board, though the rhythm is different—tightened by industrial intention.
Farm manager Jose Romo pops the latch on one nursery basket, and the juveniles rattle like coins in a jar, now graduated weeks past the sand-grain stage, but still small. “Six-millimeter seed in 5-millimeter mesh,” he says. “They start that tiny.” He holds one out on a wet palm, hardly larger than a postage stamp, already taking on the teardrop shape the men are coaxing from it, a perfect bowl for the brine, which keeps the meat bright from shuck to tongue.
Photography by Dan Cutrona
Photography by Dan Cutrona
Photography by Dan Cutrona
Photography by Dan Cutrona
Suspended in the brackish currents where Everglades freshwater meets the Gulf’s salty tide, the oysters feed on waters flowing through mangrove forests, developing the balance of sweetness and salinity oyster lovers expect from the best northern varieties. The warm waters ensure the bivalves skip the winter dormancy of the North, moving from seed to market size in half the time—racing toward the pass of a chef who has long been waiting for a local shell worth ordering.
But here in the Everglades, the hard labor of bringing oysters back is matched by the harder task of changing minds. Warm-water oysters have long been suspected before they are tasted, shadowed by memories of oil slicks, storms, algal blooms and headlines that continue long after the water clears. No word has done more damage than Vibrio.
Found naturally in coastal waters, the bacterium thrives in higher temperature areas, such as the Gulf. But the warming ocean has pushed the specter north, undermining the notion that cold equals safe. “Vibrio’s everywhere,” Fabio says, rolling a shell between his fingers. “In Maine, in Louisiana, here—the difference is how far and how long you ask that oyster to travel once you pull it.”
Florida law already mandates immediate icing, sub-45-degree transport and data-heavy harvester tags. Everglades Oysters tightens the arc. They keep their distribution within South Florida and run a harvest-to-order model, syncing farm pulls with restaurant needs so oysters move from water to kitchen within 24 hours. “Our bet is simple: Keep the distance short, the oyster cold and the story honest,” Fabio adds.
Photography by Tina Sargeant
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In their first year past the pilot phase, Everglades Oysters has 200,000 oysters in the water, with more than a million new seed going in this spring and another seeding planned by year’s end.
Alongside the farm, Josh and Fabio are reassembling the foundations of a native industry. In the decade since Florida allowed oyster farms to move up from the muddy floor, the count has grown from four regional half-shell operations to more than 100. Most are tiny—2 to 5 acres, with no trucks, sales staff or reliable path to market. Through their “Fresh from the Gulf” catalog, the guys have built a distribution channel, aggregating harvests from about 10 farms spanning from Apalachicola to Alligator Point into a cohesive, twice-weekly offering for chefs. They also host regular tastings where farmers and chefs compare merroirs, the marine imprint on flavor, and learn from each other.
Already, more than 100 restaurants—from Miami Michelin winners to eight Naples restaurants—are sourcing from the Florida-first supply chain, many going through several thousand Everglades oysters a week. At Miami’s Stubborn Seed, chef Jeremy Ford had been chasing a Michelin Green Star and needed a local replacement for the famous West Coast Kusshi. “They wanted the cutest, most delicious Florida oyster we could find,” Fabio says. The team sourced Little Honeys—tiny, 2.25-inch shells from Cypress Point, Florida, carrying the bright Gulf merroir of its spring-fed waters. Three weeks after they hit the menu, the Green Star followed. “We’re out here proving a warm-water oyster can be every bit as clean and delicious if you don’t drag it halfway across the continent,” Josh says. The duo is targeting up to 300 accounts as they scale, all clustered within a half-day’s drive.
Their reputation is built one chef at a time. Several months ago, at Keewaydin’s restaurant on Fifth Avenue South, the island-fusion flagship of the Phelan Family Brands empire, executive chef Carlos Ríos Babilonia stood at his pass tasting through a tray of Everglades Oysters. At first, the chef hesitated. Warm water. Florida. Red tide. Vibrio. The words have a way of assembling themselves into a cautionary chorus. But he is, before all else, ruled by his taste buds.
Courtesy Michael Pisarri/PisarriPhoto
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Warm, nutrient-rich Gulf currents and year-round growth give the bivalves their mineral depth and muscular heart. “We’re out here proving a warm-water oyster can be every bit as clean and delicious if you don’t drag it halfway across the continent,” Josh says. Pictured here: an oyster amuse-bouche at Miami’s Michelin-rated Tambourine Room.
He picks up an Everglades oyster, notes its size, small, almost demure compared with its swollen northern cousins. The liquor is clear, not cloudy. He tips the oyster back. There is the initial, abundant rush of salt, then a mineral richness he had not expected from such a warm, shallow place, and behind it a gentle sweetness lodged in that muscular heart. “This one tastes like here,” he says finally.
For centuries, the reefs ensured there would always be more. Now, replenishing the stock requires a more deliberate hand. Everglades Oysters already collects spent shells from its restaurant accounts, curing them in the sun for three to six months to strip away organic material before recommitting them to the bay, where young oysters can take hold and grow. But a bare shell is only potential. Seed it first, and it goes back in as living matter.
Josh and Fabio want to create their own hatchery, where broodstock spawn in controlled tanks and larvae are raised until they’re ready for open water. Surplus seed would go back to the water to jump-start new reefs where wild habitat has thinned. For the farm, it would also mean seed raised for local waters from the start. Gulf-bred oysters are already adapted to the high salinity and heat, eliminating the ‘travel shock’ that can kill seed imported from distant hatcheries.
Back on the barge, as the sun begins to wane, Josh shucks and hands me a cracked oyster. I tip it in. The flavor is brine forward, then sweet, with a faint, ferrous depth. Food writers suggest that when we eat an oyster, we taste the sea as it was at that precise, unrepeatable moment. Here, in this narrow slice of the Ten Thousand Islands, the taste carries more, a swift, bright crescendo of all the lives that have bent over this water, piling shells, trusting that the beds would give again.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
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Two years after opening, Everglades Oysters are now served in more than 100 South Florida dining rooms, from Chops City Grill (next picture) to Miami’s Barra Callao (third picture). For founders Josh and Fabio, the farm is also an act of restoration—reviving a Gulf oyster tradition sustained for centuries by the Calusa. The team returns spent restaurant shells to the water to form new reefs and aims to build a hatchery to produce its own seed.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
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Courtesy Barra Callao
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