Bez Oysters & Seafood

Bezmalinovic, Nick

In the New Orleans area's most popular oyster houses such as Acme and Felix's in the Quarter, Casamento's and Pascal's Manale in Uptown New Orleans, and Drago's and Bozo's in Metairie the best shuckers can pry open as many as 250 oysters in an hour. Shucking is the final step in a process that begins a day or two earlier on the oyster boats that cluster along the docks in places like the Empire Marina, about 75 miles south of New Orleans in Plaquemines Parish.

This is the territory where large numbers of Croatian families resettled early in the twentieth century after migrating from the islands in the Adriatic Sea off the Dalmatian coast. One who came much more recently is Nick Bezmalinovic. In 1984, when Bezmalinovic was in his mid-20s, he arrived at Belle Chasse in upper Plaquemines. After working oyster boats he took a job trucking oysters from Empire to New Orleans. A few years ago he managed to buy a used oyster boat which he renamed the Island of Brac, for his birthplace in Croatia. The vessel now provides the lifeblood for Bezmilinovic's company, Bez Oysters & Seafood in Belle Chasse.

On a cool and misty morning in mid-January we boarded the Island of Brac at Empire for an on-site look at how oystermen dredge up the bivalves. Operating the iron-clad boat, about 40 feet in length, were Bezmilinovic; his captain, James Phillips; and two crewmen, Gene Ragas and Danny Sylve. Shortly after we entered the bay, crew members started using an ages-old technique for locating oyster beds. They grabbed thin bamboo poles, about 25 feet in length, and started poking them into the water, 10 to 15 feet deep, hoping for contact with any rock-like surface that might signal the presence of oysters above the semi-liquid sediment lying on the bottom. Eventually a crewman's pole struck paydirt. The spot was marked with another pole shoved into a softer surface, and the oyster boat started circling the pole in an area about a hundred feet in diameter. (Bourg, G. 2005)