OystHERS Maine: Small-batch oysters from female growers.
At OystHERS in Bath, Maine, sisters Sadia and Lauren Crosby are building a raw bar around a focused idea: oysters grown in Maine, with an emphasis on small, female-owned, family-run farms that often sit outside the wholesale system.
The oyster list is shaped as much by the growers as it is by geography. Alongside oysters from Sadia Crosby’s OystHERS Sea Farm in Georgetown, the Bath raw bar seeks out small Maine producers, particularly female-owned and family-run farms that may not have the volume larger wholesale buyers require.
For Lauren Crosby, who runs the restaurant with her sister, that smaller scale is precisely the point. “Wholesalers want to buy in bulk, so they’re talking, ‘I want 1,000 oysters at a time, 2,000 oysters at a time,’” she says. “A lot of these small farms can only do maybe 600 at a time, 300 at a time, 200 at a time, but they’re still growing a really nice product, like a craft product.”
“We really seek out farmers that we know are female-owned, family-owned and smaller production. Craft oysters, if you will.” It is a niche within an already specialised industry, but one that gives OystHERS a clear identity. Rather than treating oysters as an anonymous raw-bar staple, the restaurant keeps the connection to individual farms visible.
From Georgetown waters to the raw bar
That understanding of small-scale production comes from experience. Sadia started OystHERS Sea Farm in Georgetown in 2018, initially as a side project. The sisters grew up there as the daughters of commercial lobsterman Captain Angus McGregor Crosby, filling bait bags on their father’s boat and seeing first-hand how unpredictable making a living from the water could be.
“Maine is very deeply rooted in my soul,” Lauren says. “My dad was a commercial lobsterman, so my sister and I grew up down in Georgetown.”
Their father was keen that his daughters pursued careers away from commercial fishing. “He really did not want us to be in the commercial fishing industry,” Lauren says. “He was very strict about, ‘You have to get a college degree.’”
Both did. Sadia moved into environmental science, entomology and eventually aquaculture, while Lauren became a teacher, working far beyond Maine before returning home.
The unexpected death of their father at the end of 2021 became the catalyst for a change in direction. For Lauren, who was then teaching in Alaska, it brought home the distance between the life she had built and the family she had left behind. “It was a life curveball where I was like, ‘Okay, I want to get out of teaching, and I need to find a way to make a living back in Maine.’”
A former tattoo parlour with oysters at its centre
The answer became a rundown former tattoo studio on Commercial Street in Bath. Before that, the building had been a bait-and-tackle shop, giving its latest incarnation an unexpectedly appropriate link back to the waterfront.
“Sadia and I were kind of like, we want life changes,” Lauren says. “She didn’t want to go into entomology and sit in an office, and I knew in my soul I needed to get out of teaching.”
“We just were like, we need a home to sell Sadia’s oysters and maybe some beer and wine.” The reality of opening a restaurant proved more complicated. The sisters began with $10,000 between them, signed a five-year commercial lease and worked through building permits, plumbing, electrical work and a long list of costs they had not anticipated.
“We just had this kind of passionate fire of grief,” Lauren says. “When you’re grieving, I felt lawless. I was like, I’ve never owned a restaurant.” OystHERS opened in June 2023.
Shucked to order, sourced close to home
The restaurant has retained that direct, unfussy character. Oysters are shucked to order rather than prepared in advance, while the menu brings Sadia’s own harvest together with a changing selection from other Maine farms. Even the accompaniments are developed around individual oysters. During our visit, Lauren talks through the restaurant’s house oyster alongside a blackberry and tarragon mignonette.
“The blackberry was designed specifically for our house oysters,” she says. “We were trying out all different types of mignonettes and experimenting. We just saw blackberry, for some reason, paired really well with the butter of Sadia’s oyster.”
The focus on small growers also means the list can reflect producers who might struggle to reach restaurants through conventional wholesale routes. That distinction matters to Lauren. Larger farms may be able to provide thousands of oysters in a single order, while smaller producers are operating at a very different scale.
The quality, she argues, can be just as strong. For diners, that means the oyster platter becomes a way of tasting several versions of Maine’s coast while also understanding something about the businesses behind them.
Keeping the business close to the water
OystHERS has grown significantly since its first summer, but the sea farm still determines its rhythm. The restaurant operates seasonally and follows the oyster-growing calendar, with Sadia returning to the farm when the cages need attention. That connection keeps OystHERS from feeling detached from the industry it represents. The sisters are not simply buying into an oyster culture from the restaurant side. They are part of the production chain themselves.
Their background in a lobstering family provides another layer, but OystHERS is not an exercise in recreating their father’s business. Instead, Lauren and Sadia have taken what they understand about Maine’s working waterfront and found a different way to participate in it. The result is a raw bar whose most interesting idea is also one of its simplest: give small growers a route to the table and make sure diners know whose oysters they are eating.
“We had not planned for this restaurant,” Lauren says. Of Sadia’s oyster farm, she adds: “If you asked us five years ago if she was ever going to do anything with it, I think we both would have said, ‘No way.’”
Their father wanted his daughters to use their heads rather than their backs. In the end, they have found a way to use both.
OystHERS Raw Bar & Bubbly
97 Commercial Street, Suite 101, Bath, Maine 04530
Seasonal opening / oysthers.com
