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Oysters and Mussels from the Bassin de Thau
Appears in
Published 2012
Bouzigues, on the Bassin de Thau, has an open sky, water as far as you can see, changing in colour like mother of pearl, and a whole row of little restaurants all packed to the seams with people laughing merrily and eating tons of shellfish. The tables are piled high with enormous plateaux de fruits de mer, everyone is wrestling with crabs and langoustes, opening mussel shells and tipping oysters into their mouths.
People seem to get into a special mood when they eat oysters, happy, excited, amorous. And if you like oysters this is the place to come. The Bassin de Thau, a vast salt lagoon on which Bouzigues depends for its living, shelters an enormous oyster fishery, with many farms – these cannot be called beds, since the oysters are raised in a different way here. Sticking out of the water, which is freshened twice daily by the Mediterranean, are frames from which hang a variety of ropes, and stuck to these with cement, or twined into them, are the oysters.