One shell of a discovery! The SECOND NYC diner in a week finds a pearl in her oyster dish (but it is worth a lot less than you think)
- Kristin Pulaski, 29, was dining at Maison Premiere in Williamsburg on December 15 and bit into her oyster and found a pearl inside
- The Brooklyn establishment says they’ve served over 4million oysters and this is the first time a diner has found a pearl in one
- Just 10 days before, Rick Antosh, 66, of Edgewater, New Jersey, found a pearl in his lunch at the Grand Central Oyster Bar in Manhattan
- He was dining on pan roast at Grand Central Oyster Bar in Manhattan with a pal
- The surprise treat with his meal has only happened once in the past 28 years
- Both pearls were appraised and neither were worth much- despite the rareness of such a find with Pulaski’s worth around $200 and Antosh’s worth about $400
Two people in New York in the span of a 10 days have had the rare happening of finding pearls in their oysters at fine dining establishments, with the most recent found in a restaurant in Brooklyn.
Kristin Pulaski, 29, says she thought she had a screw in her oyster when she chomped down on the the shelled delight at Maison Premiere in Williamsburg.
‘My first thought was, ”Is this like a screw or something in here?,” she told the New York Post.
‘And I took it out and saw that it couldn’t have been anything else [but a pearl]. It was pearly white and round,’ she said of her lucky find on December 15.
Just two weeks before, on December 5, a similar occurrence happened to Rick Antosh, 66, who was enjoying the Oyster Pan Roast at Oyster Bar in Grand Central.
Antosh, an Edgewater, New Jersey resident had come into the city to meet a high school friend for an afternoon meal.
Kristin Pulaski, 29, found this pearl in her oyster while dining at Maison Premiere in Brooklyn on December 15. She thought it was possibly a screw at first
Rick Antosh, 66, was dining at the Grand Central Oyster Bar on December 5 and found this pearl in his Oyster Pan Roast dish
Four million oysters have been served at Maison Premiere (left) and Pulaski’s pearl find is the first for the establishment. Meanwhile the executive chef at Grand Central Oyster Bar (right) which has been serving the shelled delicacy since 1912, said that’s only ever happened one other time since he’s been there
He was initially concerned when he felt something hard in his mouth after taking a bite of his dish, which is prepared like a stew.
‘For a fraction of a second, there was terror,’ Antosh told the Post. ‘Is it a tooth; is it a filling?’
However rare these bivalve beauty food finds are, they aren’t making either lucky customer more rich.
Antosh’s find was originally appraised by Eddie Livi, owner of DSL Pearl on West 47th Street in Manhattan, at up to $4,000 until Livi saw it in person and lowered the valuation substantially to just around $400 once he saw the size.
Antosh’s however was a better quailty than Pulaski’s whose lumpy and dulled pearl would fetch around $200.
‘Natural pearls can be very valuable, but when they come in shapes that are imperfect like this and don’t have that sheen, it would only be worth about $200,’ said Livi.
Rocky romance! Millions of years of erosion turns a boulder…
A whole lot of bling! Giant yellow diamond is unearthed in…
How to make a VEGAN Christmas dinner: Chefs offer their…
Share this article
Pulaski, who owns a nail salon, took her pearl and used it for a picture perfect manicure shot.
She says she will hold onto it and possibly turn it into a statement piece.
‘We’ve served over 4 million oysters, [and] this is the first time a pearl has ever been found,’ said Maison Premiere co-founder Joshua Boissy.
Pulaski is sharing her pearl of wisdom on the matter: ‘I’ll usually bite down on oysters a few times because I like the taste, but I know some people just swallow it whole,’ she said.
‘So maybe people swallow pearls more than they think.’
Antosh bit into his pan roast at Grand Central Oyster Bar in New York City on December 5 and found a pea-sized pearl (pictured)
The Edgewater resident had come into the city to meet a high school friend for the afternoon meal.
He was initially concerned when he felt something hard in his mouth after taking a bite of his dish, which is prepared like a stew.
‘For a fraction of a second, there was terror,’ Antosh told the Post. ‘Is it a tooth; is it a filling?’
But it wasn’t a cause for alarm. The entree, which is prepared with six Blue Point oysters, simply came with an unexpected bonus in the form of a pearl.
The pearl was found in Antosh’s pan roast which is prepared with Blue Point oysters that come to the restaurant pre-shucked from Virginia. A file photo of the pan roast is shown
Rick Antosh (pictured) said he didn’t think it was that odd at first
Antosh thought it would be less of a rare find than he imagined, considering the fabled Oyster Bar in Grand Centeral has been serving up the shelled delicacy since 1913.
‘This isn’t Joe’s Steakhouse. It’s the most famous oyster place in the United States,’ he said. ‘I [assumed] it doesn’t happen often, but figured it happens at times.’
It turns out it doesn’t happen very often, at all.
‘I’ve been here 28 years,’ Oyster Bar executive chef Sandy Ingber said. ‘This is only the second time I’ve seen this happen. And we sell over 5,000 oysters on the half shell every day.’
The bar uses oysters from Virginia that arrive pre-shucked to make its pan roast, he said, which makes it very unlikely that a pearl would make it to the restaurant, let alone into the dish.
‘It’s extremely rare, so that makes it interesting and exciting,’ Ingber said.
Pearls are created with foreign objects, like a piece of sand, make their way into the shell of an oyster.
The oyster forms the pearl around the irritant to protect the mollusk.
Matthew W. Gray, an oyster physiologist at the University of Maryland, said that pearl production in Eastern oysters is a bit of a mystery.
‘Among pearl producers, some species can produce a pearl that is the size of pea in less than one year; however, environmental and genetic factors play a role on the growth rate,’ Gray said.
‘The occurrence of natural pearls in oysters is not well understood, but anecdotally it has been estimated as 1 in 10,000.
The bar is is well known for featuring in Mad Men where Roger and Don shared a few lunchtime cocktails, causing Roger to throw up at the feet of Richard Nixon’s campaign staffers back at the office.
Source: Read Full Article