Eat in

Today is order day, and Anthony Marchetti, director of operations for Rappahannock River Oysters (RRO), is going over his list of 60-odd restaurants with which the company deals directly. He’s ringing each client to make sure they get the product they need, when they need it. By week’s end, RRO will have shipped as many as 50,000 oysters to dozens of restaurants from here to Honolulu. “Our clients know when I call them that our oysters are still in the water,” says Marchetti. “We don’t pull them up and hope to sell them.”

After slogging along in relative anonymity for 100 years, even going dormant, Rappahannock River Oysters is now back in business and making a name for itself. The company’s bivalves have impressed some renowned chefs and gourmets around the country—among them “Top Chef” host Tom Colicchio, owner of the restaurant Craftsteak, and Daniel Boulud of Daniel in New York City, both of whom have featured RRO’s oysters on their menus. Ryan Croxton says that his firm’s signature Rappahannocks are distinctive because “they are sweet oysters, not briny.” So distinctive that in his 2007 book, A Geography of Oysters, author Rowan Jacobsen named Rappahannock River oysters as one of the 12 North American oysters readers “should know.”

The little company’s success is almost accidental. “It started out as a nostalgic hobby,” says Ryan Croxton, 40, who, together with his cousin Travis, decided in 2001, over a couple of beers, to revive a family business that dates back to 1899. That’s when the Croxton’s great grandfather, a dirt farmer named James Arthur Croxton Jr., started raising oysters to earn some money in the colder months. Their grandfather, William Arthur Croxton Sr., then turned the company into a viable business, acquiring half-a-dozen boats and wholesaling the oysters to companies like Campbell’s Soup. Neither man had envisioned building a large oyster company—the business was too hard and too fickle. “Our grandfather told our dads to go to college and do something else,” says Ryan. So they did. The cousins followed suit—Travis earning a postgraduate degree in finance, Ryan a postgraduate degree in literature.