Cap Ferret Oyster Shack
— a dozen oysters and the tide coming in.
Not only on a wall.
“Wooden cabanes line the bay at L'Herbe and Le Canon, painted in faded blues and greens, the shells crunching underfoot. No menus. The plate that comes out has a dozen oysters opened that morning, country bread, a bowl of grey shrimp, a small jug of white wine. The dune sits across the water like a long pale wall. The tide goes out and the boats lean over and the oyster farmers walk out across the mudflats. Most people don't say much.
Cap Ferret Oyster Shack, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Cap Ferret peninsula is a long sand spit in the Gironde department of southwestern France, separating the Bassin d'Arcachon from the Atlantic. It runs about 25 kilometres from Lège in the north to the lighthouse at its southern tip, and is part of the commune of Lège-Cap-Ferret. The oyster villages of L'Herbe, Le Canon, Piraillan, Le Four, and La Vigne sit along the bay side, sheltered from the ocean. Each was originally a working hamlet of oyster farmers, and many of the wooden cabanes are protected under local zoning to preserve the village character. The peninsula faces the Dune du Pilat across the bay, the tallest sand dune in Europe.
The Bassin d'Arcachon is a tidal lagoon of roughly 155 square kilometres, opening to the Atlantic through a single narrow pass. The water exchanges nearly entirely on each tide, drawing in the cold ocean and flushing out the lagoon, which is what makes the oysters taste the way they do. The Crassostrea gigas, the Pacific oyster, has been cultivated here since the 1970s, when it replaced the native variety lost to disease. Each oyster takes three to four years to reach plate size, growing in mesh bags on tables set out across the mudflats. At low tide the farmers walk out to tend them; at high tide the same flats are silver water.
The cabanes open in the late morning and stay open through the afternoon, most without reservations and most without a printed menu. The dégustation plate is the form: a dozen oysters numbered 2 or 3 (the larger sizes are 0 and 1, the smaller 4 and 5), opened to order, with country bread, butter, lemon, often a bowl of grey shrimp or whelks, and a small carafe of Entre-Deux-Mers or another dry white from nearby Bordeaux. The old French rule was to eat oysters only in months with an R, September through April, when the water is cold; modern triploid farming has loosened that rule but the cold-month plate is still the better one.