Since the oil has been spewing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, Deena Trent has seen business drop at her two seafood restaurants on Jacksonville's Westside. To make matters worse, she's paying more than ever for the seafood.
Up on the Trout River, Billy Brown, owner of Jackie's Seafood, has given up serving oysters on the half shell, they're just too hard to get. And he's going to add more non-seafood sandwiches to his menu, "Just in case it gets crazy, and I fully expect it to."
Nationally, the U.S. imports about 83 percent of its seafood. The shrimp, tilapia and mahi coming in from Thailand, China and South America countries far outweigh what the Gulf produces. But the oil spill, now in its 75th day, has hit seafood in North Florida from all sides.
Consumers are worried about contamination, enough that the Florida Department of Agriculture has gotten several grocery store chains to post Nike AF1 Shoes "Florida Gulf Safe" logos in its seafood departments. It's also produced a video titled "We're in Business, But We Need You" with the narration: "Despite the images from the Gulf, Florida seafood is safe and ready to be enjoyed."
About one-third of the Gulf has been closed to fishing, meaning less shrimp, snapper and grouper are coming in. Prices have risen on a lot of the seafood, particularly oysters.
Larry Finch, who owns Atlantic Coast Seafood on McCormick Road and has been in the business for 35 years, said he's been paying $1 and sometimes $2 a pound more for shrimp caught here on the East Coast. The restaurants and stores that used to rely on Gulf shrimp, he said, are competing for the East Coast catch.
But, first, there was concern about safety. "They ask me if my seafood is safe," Finch said.
Trent, owner of J.L. Trent's Seafood and Grill, said she started hearing questions from customers as soon as the spill became news.
"They wanted to know if the seafood was OK," she said, "[and] where we're getting it."
Swiss Replica Antique Rolex Watches And she saw a drop in business at her 103rd Street restaurant within two weeks of the spill. A few weeks ago, business started dropping off at her restaurant in the Yukon neighborhood across from Jacksonville Naval Air Station.
She figures she's down 10-15 percent since the spill.
"We'd already taken a hit with the recession, and we were just starting to come back up."
Meanwhile, the $36 she was paying for a gallon of oysters has risen to $49. She's heard it could be $60 within a week.
The reason is simple: Oysters are hard to come by.
Marci Juskowski, co-owner of Oyster Co-Op, a distributor in Orange Park, normally gets most of her shucked oysters out of Louisiana and a few from Texas.
But most of Louisiana's oyster beds have closed. The Red Lobster chain recently announced that it was pulling oysters off the menus at its more than 650 restaurants when its primary supplier in Louisiana shut down.
Juskowski is bringing some in from the Pacific. And she's not as fond of those.
"They're just different," she said. "Ours have such a clean, crisp, salty taste."
She usually gets her shell oysters from Apalachicola Bay, which produces 90 percent of the state's oysters. The problem there is a li
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